An analysis of the relationship between EFL students' perception of emotional and instrumental support and their motivational and emotional responses: The case of Gaziantep University

Emotional and instrumental support has an all-important role in learning language effectively, because it helps students to have a successful response motivationally and emotionally. It leads to decreasing the students' anxiety and increasing their intrinsic motivation, help-seeking behavior, and effort which are the factors of learning a foreign language productively. Thus, this thesis analyzes the relationships between EFLstudents' perceptions of emotional and instrumental support in relation to their motivational and emotional responses. To conduct the study, 200 students at the School of Foreign Languages in Gaziantep University were determined as the participants of the study. The data were collected in two stages. In the quantitative section, the data were collected through a questionnaire while in the qualitative section, a semi-structured interview was administered. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the result of the questionnaire. Pearson product-moment correlation co-efficient was used to detect the relationships between emotional support and instrumental support with anxiety, intrinsic motivation, help-seeking behavior, and effort. Finally, an independent-samples t-test was administered to find out any statistically significant difference between genders of participants in terms of emotional and instrumental support, anxiety, intrinsic motivation, help-seeking behavior, and effort. The results pointed out that there was a positive relationship between emotional support and instrumental support, a negative relationship between emotional and instrumental support with anxiety, and a positive relationship between emotional and instrumental support with intrinsic motivation, help-seeking behavior, and effort. Furthermore, the results showed that there was no statistically significant difference between male and female students concerning emotional support, anxiety, intrinsic motivation, and effort, but there was a statistically significant difference between male and female students concerning instrumental support and help-seeking behavior. In addition, the findings of the interview supported those of the quantitative analyses in that there was a relationship between emotional supportand instrumental support. Also there was a positive relationship between emotional and instrumental support with intrinsic motivation, help-seeking behavior, and effort. Key words: Emotional and instrumental support, anxiety, intrinsic motivation, help-seeking behavior,effort