A case study of EFL university students’ motivation for online vocabulary learning

With the rapid and advanced growth of technological tools, online learning becomes a prominent trend in teaching ESL/EFL all over the world, especially in higher education. Such an example is learning English vocabulary. Students can learn and retain vocabulary using different sources of materials via the internet or online tools. Furthermore, motivation is a crucial element that helps students retain vocabulary and facilitate their success in learning English. This study explores Taiwanese EFL university students’ motivation in learning English vocabulary online and the relationship between students’ motivation and their background characteristics, including gender, university major, and years of study. The participants consisted of 200 EFL students at a technical university in central Taiwan. They were asked to answer a survey questionnaire adopted from previous studies. Data obtained were analyzed using SPSS. The t-test was applied to examine if there was any significant difference between EFL university students’ motivation and their background characteristics. The findings indicated that female students were significantly more instrumentally motivated than males, but there was no significant difference between males’ and females’ integrative motivation and personal motivation. Additionally, the results of the one-way ANOVA showed that English major students were highly instrumentally motivated, integratively motivated, and personally motivated than non-English major students in learning English vocabulary online. These findings provide some educational implications for teachers and contribute to the literature considering EFL university students’ motivation for online vocabulary learning.