Demotivation and Demotivation-Reducing Strategies: Exploring EFL Learners’ Perceptions

Although many researchers have addressed demotivation, few studies have investigated English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ demotivation-reducing strategies. To bridge this gap, the present study sought to explore EFL learners’ perceptions of the sources of demotivation and their strategies to deal with it. Participants were 30 Iranian EFL learners at different levels of proficiency and from different language institutes, selected based on convenience sampling. This research was carried out through a qualitative method using interviews. The data were collected via two semi-structured interviews concerning learners’ perceptions of sources of demotivation and the strategies they used to deal with it. To analyze the data, the researcher used content analysis, the results of which indicated that learners specified five sources of demotivation including method of instruction, teacher’s personality, peer’s characteristics, anxiety, and classroom physical conditions. The learners mentioned studying English at a particular time of day, studying with students with better English knowledge, finding a friendly teacher, asking the teacher to tell jokes in English, and asking for exciting tasks and games in classrooms as demotivation-reducing strategies. Teachers are encouraged to take the sources of demotivation into account in order to help learners become less demotivated, and cooperate with learners in using demotivation-reducing strategies.