Students' progressive behavioral learning patterns in using machine translation systems – A structural equation modeling analysis

Abstract

The study investigated the motivation and anxiety of 681 undergraduate students from a medical university who used machine translation systems to read textbooks written in English. Questionnaires were collected from Mandarin Chinese speakers who were not English majors. Technology Acceptance Models were developed to illuminate the relationships among perceived usefulness of machine translation systems, perceived ease of use, learning motivation for English, and foreign language reading anxiety. The results showed that overall, using machine translation systems produced benefits, including increasing the students' motivation to learn English and further decreasing their anxiety when it comes to reading textbooks written in English. Also, when the students become more familiar with using machine translation systems, they gain a better understanding of the systems' possibilities as well as their limitations. The greater the ease of use and the more usefulness that students experience while employing the systems, the stronger the impact of the systems on increasing students’ motivation to learn English and decreasing their learning anxiety.