The Importance Of Motivation In Foreign Language Learning

Motivation represents the feelings of the learner towards the particular target language, its culture and the individual pragmatic reasons for learning a foreign language (Horwitz, 1990). According to Keller (1983) “motivation refers to the choices people make as to what experiences or goals they will approach or avoid and the degree of effort they will excerpt in this report” (p. 389). Tackling the motivation and language learning emerged out of the curiosity of the researchers to investigate and evaluate motivation in foreign language learning at International University of Sarajevo (IUS). Since learning foreign language is inherently difficult it would be of a great satisfaction if we, researchers, uncover problems and difficulties that foreign language learners face on their path in foreign language learning at the

Motivation plays a crucial role in willingness of students to obtain knowledge and capabilities to use L2 for variety of purposes. Moiinvaziri M. (2009) argued that English language learners were motivated instrumentally as well as integrativelly. This claim was in conflict with the researchers who claimed that only instrumental motivation is important in SLA. He concluded that in English Language learning both instrumental & integrative motivation are important. Then, Al-Hazemi H. (2000) argued that desire to learn English language should arise from within the learner. In an ideal situation, learners should have very high desire to learn foreign language. According to him, the strong desire for L2 learning contributes to a high degree of competence and success in language learning. Dornyei (1994) stated that the nature of social and pragmatic dimensions of target language depends on who, what and where i.e. who learns the language, what language and