WHAT MOTIVATES LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN ONLINE LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENT: A COVID-19-AFFECTED CLASSROOM TESTIMONY

In the unprecedented era education systems around the world are witnessing, where our daily decisions are influenced by the COVID-19-related measures, this paper aims to cast some additional light on the phenomena of motivation in a (virtual) language classroom. Relying on corpora comprising the answers provided by a group of primary-school graduates, this paper, in both quantitative and qualitative manner, reports on the students’ attitudes towards various motivational factors affecting the process of learning English in an online environment. Though it can be said that present-day language learners show interest for learning English, being aware of the surrounding contemporary needs, the results of analysing the answers they gave in the study point to the need to incorporate interaction and synchronous communication in teaching-learning practices in order to increase their motivation to participate and study.