Motivating Students to Speak in the Foreign Language Arena
Motivating Students to Speak in the Foreign Language Arena

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to describe the attitudes and motivation in second language acquisition (SLA) among a group of Communication and Public Relations students in the first and third year of the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. One of the reasons that attracted our attention was the students’ reluctance to speak English in class in spite of the fact that they would become communication specialists. Our main concern was to investigate why some of the students refused to speak English, what would motivate them to use the language and which attitudes and methods could lead to their motivation. Having Gardner and Lambert’s studies as the main reference points, we distinguished between instrumental and integrative motivation and we could notice in the case of our respondents an interesting combination of the above mentioned types of motivation. However, integrative motivation seemed to play a more important role.

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