Negative attitude of students towards language also stemmed from curriculum management throughout the educational grade systems. In exploring attitudes and preferences of student toward learning English, Al- Bustan (2009) found that some of the participants developed a strong dislike for learning English because of the discontinuity between teaching approaches used in their former high school at university with regards to negative attitudes. Poor motivation leading to poor attitudes was also found to be caused by the fact that English was not valued throughout the curriculum since it was not given the status of major subject at university level. This study showed that poor attitudes were also caused by beliefs of the students that their teachers used approaches which did not motivate them to learn.
Some learners viewed English as instrumentally worthless that it did not serve any professional purposes. As a consequence, they developed poor attitudes toward English (Abu-Melhim, …show more content…
Supportive with the mentioned above, the aspects of motivation and academic performance were reciprocal. The more one increased, the more the other increased; therefore, students who were successful and motivated would continue to be whereas students who did not succeed were less likely to become motivated to succeed. According to Burris, Heubert and Levin (2004), motivation was an essential factor in promoting academic performance of students and it should be implement into classroom to increase test scores which in turn motivated students further. In another word, motivation had been found to affect attitudes by causing students to have more positive attitudes and confidence in themselves. According to Ellis (2010), motivation positively affected performance with the two existing in a cycles so that as one increases the other