0. Group Dynamics, Teacher and Motivation

The difficult nature of FLL together with the number of the learners in the classroom and the multiplicity of the characteristics of each individual including the teacher is a recipe which makes the foreign language classroom a crucible. In this, we can refer to what Thomas (1991: 29) notes:

“The way that participants in classroom feel about each other, and about the situation they are in, has an important influence on what actually goes on in a classroom. Feelings and attitudes can make for smooth interaction and successful learning, or can lead to a conflict and a total breakdown of communication ”.

Of course, the interaction can in no way be smooth and successful without the instructor’s powerful position. That is, one of the responsibilities of the teacher is to guide and motivate his students to work out the appropriate strategies to succeed in such a delicate assignment as FLL. It is, indeed, a difficult task to motivate the students or to maintain their motivation alive. The reason is that foreign language classrooms are “…complicated social communities. Individual learners come to them with their own constellation of native languages and culture, proficiency level, learning style, motivation and attitudes toward language learning” (Pica, 1992 In Kral, 1999: 59). To say it otherwise, learners are different from each other and the instructor is said to be aware of the individual learners differences to succeed in teaching. Consequently, it is difficult for the teacher to deal with each individual solely and to motivate him successfully (Turner, 1978: 234) especially that what may help motivate a student may prove to be detrimental for another.

Accordingly, the students’ motivation can be either high or low before attending the classroom and even once in the classroom. However, the interaction between the learners and the teacher may affect the students’ level of motivation because everything depends on the emotions and feelings that this interaction generates. Additionally, the strains that the peers exert on the learner and the teacher’s error-correction method have an effect on the beginners’ motivation.

This was just a brief account on the role of the teacher and the learners themselves in enhancing motivation. Our work is more likely to be practical and our interpretation of the situation is limited to our population which we hope be generalised for larger populations. In what follows, a full description is provided of the investigation we have conducted.

2. Methodology

2.1. The Setting and Subjects

To try to understand how motivation is affected in first year students learning EFL at university level, it is needed to focus more on the classroom setting where the bulk of the language is taught and learnt. This study is, then, aimed at displaying the points that might explain the reasons of the lack of motivation that students might feel. We have attempted to find out the main grounds that may engender the lack of motivation using a self-completed questionnaire designed for first year students learning EFL; inscribed in the new applied LMD system. The age range varies between 17 and 22 years old which might refer to a vital period of the individual’s life where his strengths are relevant and motivation is to be present. To reach convenient answers, to attain our objectives which we are going to name bellow, and to try to validate our hypotheses; we have chosen the end of the second semester where the participants are said to be able to answer the questions we have constructed in the selected tool of investigation, i.e. the questionnaire. However, before stating the results obtained from our study, we need to present our statement of the problem, the objectives of the study and the determined hypotheses.

The central problem of this work is to know whether/how the students’ lack of motivation is rooted from classroom interaction i.e. teacher-student and student-student interaction. In other words, we have started our questioning by:

is the mere presence of the students in the classroom, their interaction with their peers and the relationship with their teacher to affect the students’ motivation?

To obtain answers we, of course, have some determined aims we want to reach. Hence, the objectives we tried to cover in this work are grouped in:

1. Witnessing whether first year students of English in the university of Bejaia manifest some lack of motivation in the classroom or not;

2. Determining the main reasons that breed lack of motivation in the classroom in the new learners of a foreign language;

3. Glimpsing whether the teaching habits and the teacher’s personality affect the students motivation or not; and

4. Spotting whether the kind of peers’ interaction in the classroom is likely to affect (either positively or negatively) the students’ motivation or not.

At this level, we have built our survey on the basis of two hypotheses. We, thus, hypothesise that:

1. If the students’ motivation is affected in the foreign language classroom, the cause will be attributed, first, to the teaching methods and, then, to the teacher’s personality and attitudes.

2. If the students’ motivation is low or lowered in the classroom, this is partly due to interaction among the students (i.e. to the group dynamics).