The influence of socio-economic background, personal effort and motivation on English proficiency
Keywords:
Socio-economic background, personal effort, language input, motivation, english proficiencyAbstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of three factors –socio-economic background, individual effort, and motivation– in English proficiency, and the possible relation between individual effort and family background, and between motivation and family background. The instrument used to collect the data was a questionnaire completed by 159 students from three high schools in Spain. The answers to the questionnaire were correlated with those students’ grades in the subject English using SPSS. Results indicated that, from the three factos analyzed, motivation influenced students’ proficiency the most and that motivation correlated with mother’s occupation and higher amounts of input outside classes. From these findings, it can be concluded that English proficiency can be improved by increasing motivation, which in turn, can be increased by teachers providing more input and more enjoyable ways of getting input outside class such as listening to music or watching films in English.
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