Motivation and Second Language Acquisition: Phase 2 of a Longitudinal Study of Undergraduates at an Italian University

This paper reports on the second phase of a longitudinal study of the motivation of Italian undergraduates who enrolled on degree course in modern languages at the University of Cagliari in 2008. A questionnaire was administered to 152 students as they were about to sit their end-of-year exams in English in May or June 2009. The aim of the survey was to obtain data on changes in the students’ motivation, their self-assessment of the progress they had made in learning English, and their ratings of the teaching received, the organization of their courses and the relevance of their studies to the job market. Variables taken into consideration were gender, age, initial level of English and choice of degree course. The main finding was that motivation to learn L2 English remained high despite less than enthusiastic ratings of organizational and institutional factors. Just over 50% reported that they were either very or fairly satisfied with their progress and a further 37% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. Of the variables investigated, the most important was found to be choice of degree course, with motivation being considerably higher among those who had enrolled on the most linguistically demanding of the three courses available