THE EFFECT OF MOTIVATIONAL SHIFT ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING

Abstract

Studies have long firmly indicated Motivational Orientations as a great promoting factor toward
English language learning. However, most of those studies were mainly focused on discovering the
causal relationship between two motivational orientation types, Integrative and Instrumental
Motivation, and the learning expectancy to figure out the greater influence of the two motivational
types on learning success; whereas other studies suggested that motivation is situational
disregarding the aforesaid motivational types. It should not be rigidly acclaimed that one
motivational type is more contributing than the others. Thus, this present study aims to unravel the
possible motivational shift and to scrutinize the effect of the shift toward English language learning.
A sequential mixed method was used examined to a total of 44 selected participants from university
students majoring in English. They were administered a questionnaire adapted from Gardner’s
Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB). 15 of them were selected for the interview section. The
data from both employed instruments were holistically analyzed using a triangulation approach.
The findings exhibited that motivation can be shifted which is mostly influenced by the
surroundings and the respective needs. This indicates that one type of motivation cannot be rigidly
perceived to have a more significant move toward language learning. Either instrumental or
integrative motivation has an equal state for language learning success. Besides, the data shows that
the shift from Integrative to Instrumental motivation appears to be more leading in promoting
learning success than the reverse shifting, Instrumental to Integrative.