Defining the Underlying Factors of Ukrainian Student Pilots’ Motivation to Learn Aviation English

Abstract

Motivation plays an important role in language acquisition. The article highlights the necessity of student pilots‟ motivation in learning English. The research sheds light on the underlying factors of motivation in learning aviation English. The concept “motivation” was analyzed in the article. The factors of influence on students‟ motivation were grouped into three categories: how teacher‟s activity influences the educational process; how students‟ activity influences the educational process; how organization of the educational process influences quality of studying. The research focused on studying pilots‟ motivation to learn aviation English. The participants of the experiment were 247 people, among them third- and fourth-year student pilots of the Flight Academy of the National Aviation University (Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine), third- and fourth-year student pilots of the Kharkiv Air Force University named after I. M. Kozhedub (Kharkiv,Ukraine), flight instructors and pilots of aviation company “URGA” (Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine). The reason behind this division was to test motivation, to define the key factors and motives of pilots‟ motivation to learn aviation English at flight training institutions; to trace the dynamics of changes taking place in the training of students from the third to the fourth year of studying. Data were collected by giving student pilots openended questionnaires, which comprise 3 blocks of the underlying factors of motivation to learn aviation English. After that a statistical analysis was conducted which showed a variation in the results between the groups of respondents; it allowed to define a variety of factors influencing students‟ motivation. Each factor was assessed on the 7-point evaluation scale. The number of points received for each factor was summed up and divided by the total number of respondents. The interpretation of received results has been presented in the paper.