Student Motivation: Instructors Accent Effect on Cognitive Load and Performance

Cognitive load and emotional motivation play a vital role in students’ learning outcomes (Feldon et al., 2019). The current study investigates students’ motivation and cognitive load in relation to online lecture videos created by native English speaking (NES) instructors and non-native English-speaking (NNES) instructors. According to the LSA (Linguistic Society of America), there are two kinds of accents; a “foreign” accent, and the one that is native to the group of people who speak it (Birner 2021). Understanding a foreign accent takes more mental effort than understanding a familiar accent, thus a NNES instructor could increase cognitive load for a NES student. This increased cognitive load can lead to decreased motivation and result in the decline of understanding the learning outcome. Participants in the current study were college students who completed the experiment on Qualtrics, an online survey program. We used a within-group design, so participants were exposed to both conditions, after completing the lecture and recall questions they were surveyed to measure cognitive load and emotional motivation. Our findings indicate that learners experience higher cognitive load and lower motivation in the NNES instructor learning condition. The findings from our current study have implications for scientific research education and pedagogical practices