Factors Demotivating Secondary School Students in Their Foreign Language Learning Process and Their Ways to Deal with These Factors

One of the factors affecting the language learning process is motivation. A highly-motivated student not only utilizes the learning strategies necessary to learn a foreign language but also does their best to use the language. However, the motivation of the student is affected by many negative situations and these results in the de-motivation -the decrease of the motivation- of the student. The aim of this study is to find out the factors demotivating secondary-school-students in their foreign language learning process and how the students deal with these factors in accordance with their opinions. The data of the study were collected via de-motivation scale developed by the researcher and two open-ended questions. While, for the analysis of the data obtained from the scale, normality test, independent samples t-test and one-way ANOVA were utilized, for the data obtained from the open-ended questions, content analysis was employed. The results of the data obtained from the scale showed that secondary-school students were highly de-motivated in their foreign language learning process. According to gender variable, female students were more de-motivated that the male students. As for the grade variable, it was found that there was no significant difference in “failure” sub-scale of the de-motivation scale, yet there were significant differences in other sub-scales. The students shed light on such activities as memorizing vocabulary, doing too many language test, reading books, watching films, listening to music in English extramurally and playing games and holding competitions intramurally