MOTIVATION AND PERCEPTION OF SUCCESS IN ITALIAN AS FOREIGN AND SECOND LANGUAGE COMPETITIONS

Abstract

The aim of the paper is first, to present a brief overview of the history and the current structure of the Slovene national competition for secondary school pupils in Italian as foreign language and second language, followed by a presentation and discussion of the results of a survey of contestants from the year 2013. The topics discussed are: the contestants’ reasons and motivations for participating in the competition, as well as their perception of success or failure and of their sense of achievement or failure. In the survey we analyse the participants’ preferences for all the skills tested, i.e. reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, intercultural understanding, communication, written composition.
The motivations are mostly intrinsic, extrinsic ones are less common. Only rarely is the motivation stated to be the encouragement and effective work of the teacher. As for the perception of success, that is, being able to demonstrate the linguistic knowledge, the participant from the (bilingual) coastal area of Slovenia give priority to the written essay, whereas those from the rest of Slovenia tend to attach more importance to comprehension tasks. On the other hand all contestants tend to have difficulty in grammatical test and intercultural understanding, although the latter tends to be regarded as the most enjoyable task along with the comprehension tasks (at lower levels) and the written essay (at higher levels).