The Influence of the Digital Teaching of Language for Specific Purposes on Students’ Motivation

Abstract

The common framework for languages has set two primary goals for foreign language teaching to achieve: multilingualism and learner autonomy. Teachers are accountable for the development of learner autonomy, through the micro-planning of teaching, and each of us reading from experience has come to the conclusion that the learner autonomy cannot exist without motivation (and vice versa). The aspect of motivation plays the most important role in the acquisition of language skills, but as it is highly subjective, it is very hard to “tame” it methodologically. That problem is particularly challenging in the teaching of language for specific purposes: on the one hand, these are adult learners who by the nature of things are consciously motivated, although often extrinsically; on the other hand, this is not the main subject which they have chosen to study which can often negatively impact their motivation. Due to this, motivating students has always been like walking a tight rope between a “carrot and stick” approach (especially if we consider the common means of evaluation from one side of the spectrum to another of the extrinsically motivated learning). The aim of this paper was to study the degree to which switching to classes in a digital environment, impacted by the pandemic, influenced learner motivation. This paper is based on empirical research via a questionnaire sent to students at university faculties where German for Specific Purposes is taught. The intention was to embrace two aspects of this problem: whether the switching to classes in a digital environment had a positive or a negative impact on the motivation and whether the impact (if there was one) lead in any way to the internalisation of the motivation. In the summary of the paper is the attempted systematization of the aspects of the digital teaching from our practices, which presented accordingly through the empirical research, show that the aspects can be beneficial for the improvement of motivation in a digital environment.