A comparison of male and female EFL learners about motivation and peer impacts on motivation for learning listening and speaking skills

Abstract

The importance of language learning motivation has been proved through different research. However, this field of psychological research has been never saturated and there is still missing data on the impact of gender on learning motivation. In the realization of the lack of data on the impact of gender on learning motivation that can bring a novel implication for future research, the author proposed this study to have a comprehensive comparison of male and female EFL learners about motivation for learning listening and speaking skills in terms of ideal L2 self, ought-to self, L2 learning experience, motivational intensity, intrinsic motivation, external regulation, identified regulation, introjected regulation, amotivation. Besides, the author also investigated the peer impacts on motivation for learning listening and speaking skills. Data was collected from 74 junior and senior students majoring in English (55 females and 19 males). The findings showed that both male and female EFL learners are highly motivated to learn listening and speaking skills by different types of motivation. In general, however, males mostly performed a higher degree of motivation than females. They are equally intrinsically and extrinsically stimulated to learn listening and speaking skills while their female counterparts showed a tendency to be intrinsically motivated to learn listening and speaking skills rather than extrinsically. Besides, the results also revealed that males possessed more competitiveness in learning than females. What’s more, the findings indicated that both males and females are greatly motivated by positive peers and negative peers play no major role in motivation for learning listening and speaking skills. From the findings, practical and theoretical implications are discussed.