With the growing popularity and its importance of learning English and its implications to Korean society, Korean’s English language level has improved. In the EFL context of Korean society, with regards of individual differences of language learner...
With the growing popularity and its importance of learning English and its implications to Korean society, Korean’s English language level has improved. In the EFL context of Korean society, with regards of individual differences of language learners, it is perhaps significant to describe Korean learners of English who are especially successful language learners. This study investigates 1) learners’ attitudes and pivotal motivational events, 2) integrative and instrumental motivation and 3) real and ideal selves in order to describe successful learners, in terms of motivational concepts. Ninety seven students aged 20 to 50, taking university or graduate level courses in English were chose for this study. A survey was conducted based on Gardner’s (1972) AMTB (Attitue/Motivation Test Battery). This study looks into the relationships among several variables: age, gender and experience abroad, and learners’ motivation, and the results are following.
The first key finding was that Korean learners of English were aware of the importance of the learning English language and had experienced motivational events in the past. Many of these motivational events were related more to friends or peers than themselves or other factors. This finding reflects Dornyei’s (2005) claim which emphasizes the importance of peer influence in learning a foreign language. The study also found that integrative and instrumental motivaton scored similarly, thus finding neither more significant. Also, age, gender and experience abroad variable do not affect learners’ both integrative and instrumental motivation.
Third, real and ideal self concepts did not deliver significant findings that could describe successful Korean learners of English. It was revealed that age, gender and experience abroad also did not affect real and ideal self. One interesting finding was that participants with more than 3 years of experience abroad scored higher than non-experienced in the real self measurement.
These results show that age, gender and experience abroad themselves may not be highly influential variables when it comes to becoming a successful language learner. However, the duration of experience abroad could play a role in motivating learners and making them successful in foreign language learning. Thus, experience abroad could be considered a factor in learners’ self-confidence and success.