Demotivating Factors in EFL Context: Examining Nature and the Role of Socio-demographic Variables

Abstract

The concept of demotivation has received the same attention as motivation, especially in the EFL context. However, a review of the literature in Iran’s context indicates a lack of studies exploring the nature of demotivating factors, that is internal or external, and the role of variables of the structure of schools, fields of study, and proficiency level. The context of the study was the schools of Bam City in Iran. Sampling technique was stratified random sampling, and totally 244 female students of different types of schools that are public, vocational, private schools, and school for the talented responded to a demotivation questionnaire. The analysis of the collected data through the questionnaire using factor analysis indicated that three factors of “learner,” “learning situation,” and “teacher,” were present. According to descriptive statistics, demotivated students considered themselves as the main reason for not progressing in English which emphasized the role of internal factors. In addition, according to one-way analysis of variance, demotivational factors did not differ significantly among different fields of study, however, different school types were significantly different from each other in terms of these factors. Finally, the result of the Pearson correlation test indicated the existence of a significant relationship between demotivational factors and students’ achievement. The findings of this study provide necessary insight to both teachers and their students in their act of teaching and learning languages.