Understanding Secondary School Students’ Motivation to Learn Spanish

Abstract

Taking into consideration the crucial role of motivation in learning foreign languages, the author of this text, who is also a high school Spanish teacher, decided to conduct a study whose aim was to discover which factors motivate high school students to learn this language and how students’ motivation changes depending on the time they have been learning the language. The study involved two groups of high school students whose third language was Spanish (after Polish and English). The first group included first-year students aged approximately 15-16, and the second group included third-year students aged approximately 17-18. A total of 30 people took part in the study (15 in the first group and 15 in the second group). The research tool used in the study was a survey including several parts, which was inspired by the survey created by Zoltán Dörnyei and Ema Ushioda in 2021, included in the book Teaching and Researching motivation. The students were asked to respond to sixteen statements based on a Likert scale, where each number from 1 to 5 represented a different level of agreement. Having analysed the survey results, one could come to the conclusion that first-year students are much more motivated to learn Spanish than third-year students. The results from this part were as follows: Year I – 45.55% of students motivated; Year III – 31.68% of students motivated. Therefore, it is necessary to eliminate demotivating factors and support situations that motivate students in order to teach Spanish to high school students as effectively as possible.