Factors That Motivate High-School Students' Decisions to Study Spanish

This article reports on an investigation of high-school students' motivations to study Spanish. An online Likert-scale questionnaire was administered to 631 students and 19 teachers. The most influential factors were determined and a principal axis factor analysis with Promax rotation was performed on the responses. The data indicated that the strongest influence for starting to study Spanish was career benefits, and the strongest influence for continuing to study Spanish was grades. The factor analysis results revealed that integrative, intrinsic and instrumental factors accounted for 70.89% of the total item variance for the decision to begin studying Spanish, and extrinsic and integrative factors accounted for 55.7% of the total item variance for the decision to continue studying Spanish. Significant differences between the students' responses and their teachers' perceptions indicated that the teachers misunderstood the students' motives for studying Spanish.