Motivation To Learn A Foreign Language In Malaysia

Many nations have addressed the need to produce graduates who are multilingual in theeffort to compete in the global society. Malaysia has acknowledged the importance ofproficiency in a third language in order to develop human capital that drives the keconomyas well as competes in the international arena. This study investigatedMalaysian students’ motivation to learn a foreign language. Triangulation of methodsconsisting of survey questionnaire, document analysis and focus group discussion wereemployed for data collection. A survey based on a 16-item questionnaire was formulatedand more than 500 students from University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and UniversitiTeknologi MARA (UiTM) responded to the survey. Responses to the survey weresubjected to the Rasch and descriptive analyses in order to capture salient features ofstudents’ responses. The findings of the study indicate that UKM and UiTM studentswere extrinsically and intrinsically motivated to learn a foreign language. The results ofthe t-test, however, indicate a significant difference in terms of the motivation of studentsfrom the two universities.