Negative Feedback

Betty’s remarks reveal that the teacher did not have a set of explicit rules for conducting the activities in the class, which resulted in confusion and a decrease in students’ motivation.

Negative Feedback Teacher’s negative comments contributed significantly to a decrease in his motivation. Surya observed that his teacher seemed not to be aware that comments and negative feedback when correcting errors hurt the students and made them feel humiliated. Some students refrained from volunteering to answer questions or even chose to remain silent even though the teacher pointed at them to answer. This was illustrated by Surya as follows: I am not very interested and motivated to study English lately. I guess I became lazier and lazier. I

Instead of receiving appreciation for his efforts to voluntarily answer the questions, he felt humiliated as a result of the comments by the teacher and decided not to take part in further classroom activities.

Teacher and Student Relationships

One of the students,Weni, stressed that a good relationship between the teacher and students is an important factor in helping his motivation increase over the course of the 10 week period. She is clearly referring to the quality of relationship with the teachers, including friendliness and fairness to students. This can be detected in the following comment: I think it is important to maintain good relationships between the teacher and students. If you don’t like the teacher or the teacher does not like you for certain reasons, of course, you don’t feel like coming to the class. What I like from my English teacher now is that she is friendly and always treats everybody fairly. You know, some teachers tend to show that they have a favourite student in the class, it makes us feel that we are treated unfairly. (Weni, Year

It has been argued that “over the course of the school year, students’ motivation on average declines or becomes less adaptive as the students entered the junior high school or middle school years” (Pintrich, 2003, p. 680). In line with this, empirical evidence from the United States and Western Europe reported similar findings indicating that students’ motivation declined over time (Lamb, 2007). With respect to the increase in intrinsic goal orientation in particular, the finding of the present study was inconsistent with those of Wigfield, Eccles, and Rodriguez (1998) who argued that, over the school years, learners tend to be less intrinsically motivated to study. In a similar vein, a study conducted in an Asian context revealed that intrinsic motivation of Japanese learners of English in Japan declined from the third through sixth grade of elementary school (Carreira, 2011). Although this study was conducted over a relatively shorter time frame compared to these previous studies, the reverse tendency was exhibited by the participants. This may be an indication that the students were in an advantageous learning environment which enhanced their