The Relationship between Iranian EFL Learners‟ Motivation and Attitudes towards English Learning and Their Inference Ability in Listening Comprehension

Abstract

This thesis attempts to measure the relationship between Iranian EFL learners‟ motivation and attitude
towards English learning and their inferencing ability in listening comprehension. In order to address the
issue, a qualitative and quantitive study was conducted on a sample of 60 adult females. A listening pretest
administered to identify the participants‟ level of listening comprehension. After taking pre-test, the
Attitude/Motivation questionnaire was distributed among the participants in order to determine
respondents‟ attitudes and motivation level towards English language learning. Next, students took part in
a treatment program for two months, including eight weeks and three days per week. They attended an
English class of American English File book 3 (1997), to improve their listening ability. Finally, a
listening post-test administered to measure the participants‟ inferencing ability while they listened to
number of excerpts. The focus of all sequences of pre-test, treatment and post-test were on listening skill.
The results revealed that was a significant positive relationship between motivation and attitude and
listening test performance. The findings also revealed that a significant positive relationship listening
performance of learners in understanding short and extended linguistic discourse in terms of their
inferencing ability. In order to analyze the data in addition to the statistical indexes like, frequency,
percentage, mean and standard deviation, an inferential statistics method series of independent samples ttest-
has used. The raw data obtained from AMTB questionnaire and listening test were submitted to
SPSS program and the subsequent computations were made.