THE INFLUENCE OF EVALUATION ON STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

Motivation has inspired а lot of authors to identify its characteristics. It has also inspired students and teachers to learn and teach foreign languages through its different types and provide different results in teaching and learning the language. This is closely connected to how evaluation has the potential to influence students and motivate them to learn a foreign language and how teachers should find easier or more difficult ways of evaluating them, depending on what kind of motivation is involved during the class. This paper deals with the issue of how different evaluation methods provide opportunities for students to meet different motives. The students do that by answering a questionnaire, which is the initial hypothesis of it. The target groups are the third year students from the departments of English language and literature, German language and literature, and Macedonian language and literature at the Faculty of Philology, Goce Delcev University – Stip, 15 from each department. The students answer to 15 questions concerning the different methods they are evaluated by. They provide feedback by answering the questions and they give their opinion about the different types of evaluation methods. The results are used to give us an insight into the influence of different evaluation methods on students’ motivation, so that we can see whether they are actually the main reason why students learn or do not learn foreign languages, and to serve as inspiration to teachers to be familiar with which types of evaluation methods decrease or increase the level of motivation while learning a foreign language. As a result, they are able to use those methods in future in order to improve the level of foreign language knowledge the students should possess and gain.
Key words: education, learning, motivation, evaluation, foreign language