A study on investigating the factors that demotivate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL)

The issue of demotivation in foreign language learning is a relatively new area that has recently gained attention. For success in foreign language learning, it is of great importance to determine the source of the demotivation that students have towards language learning and to eliminate these factors. This research, adopting a sequential exploratory mixed research design, aims to develop a demotivation scale for foreign language learners. Within the scope of this scale development study, comprehensive literature review, semi-structured interviews with the participation of 17 teachers, and student compositions collected from 25 university preparatory class students were employed to create the item pool of the scale. After creating the item pool, two experts in the field of language teaching and educational sciences were consulted, and some minor changes were made on the scale. In order to test the validity and reliability of the developed scale, a pilot study was conducted with the participation of 250 university students. In order to verify the data obtained as a result of the pilot study by means of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), the main study was conducted with the participation of 533 university students. According to the results, a demotivation scale consisting of 35 items and 5 factors was developed. The factor names of the developed scale are as follows: (1) Teaching methods and teaching process, (2) Teaching material, teaching environment, and teaching facilities, (3) Teacher competence and teacher attitudes, (4) Failure experiences and lack of self-confidence, and (5) Negative attitudes towards the target language.