PERSEVERANCE AND INTEREST IN LANGUAGE LEARNING: INVESTIGATING GRIT IN HUNGARY AMONG ENGLISH MAJOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate English majors’ grit-related dispositions and their relationships to motivation and language learning emotions. The importance of this study lies in the fact that general motivation-related investigations could not explain some of the problems of language education in Hungary (Csizér, 2020) and we think that a more specific view on long-term issues pertaining to motivation, such as students’ levels of grit, might be beneficial to teachers and researchers alike. We used a standardized questionnaire to answer our research questions and employed a sample of English language majors (N = 331). The main results of our study show that participants’ motivation and grit were of medium strength, which is somewhat surprising given the sample of our study. In terms of correlations, grit correlated with emotions significantly but only at medium level. Based on our results, it seems that grit, especially, language-domain specific grit should be an important component of future studies and more care should be taken to investigate long-term motivation and its effects. Future studies could map this issue qualitatively and explore other populations as well