The Effect of Raising Students Awareness of Good Language Learning Strategies on their Motivation

Learning a foreign language provides the opportunity for the students to make connection with other customs and cultures, increase their employment chance, and promote their skills even in their own language. However, many students are not interested and motivated to learn a foreign language as a result of the boredom of many language classrooms. Yet foreign language teachers have the potential to support and encourage EFL students to recognize their needs and interests and to identify their language learning styles and strategies to develop a better sense of learning a language. The present study was conducted in an explanatory sequential mixed methods design to investigate the relationship between teaching language learning strategies directly and language learners motivations. In the study, 70 students in an intermediate level were randomly chosen and assigned into two groups. The experimental group was undertaken an instruction of explicit learning of strategies for about twice a week for two months, and the control group was taught typically. The results have shown that students had positive attitudes and very high motivation towards learning English language after being undertaken the explicit instruction of learning strategies, and based on the qualitative data of this study they were also more instrumentally motivated. It also made clear that strategies are often tied to the interests and needs of students to improve their learning and are based on many types of learning styles (Ekwensi, Moranski, &Townsend-Sweet, 2006).

کلیدواژه ها:

Integrative motivation ، instrumental motivation ، implicit learning strategies ، explicit learning strategies