Abstract:

As we are well aware, motivation cannot be addressed but individually as long as students have different degrees of sensitivity to different types of motivation. Bearing in mind this milestone, we aim to turn our attention to multilingual students in multilingual schools, assuming that the challenges of identifying learning motivations are much more complex for this category of students than for monolingual ones, where the attitude towards learning can be dictated by the attitude towards the language (s) used for the teaching-learning process during curricular and extracurricular activities. In this particular case, the attitude towards learning can be dictated by specific factors, such as the attitude induced either by society, or by their family environment towards the languages used in the educational process. Statistics show that the dropout rate is higher when considering students from multilingual schools. Therefore, the purpose of our research is to try and identify the causes and factors that prevent multilingual students from finding sufficient motivation to continue studying in all languages imposed by the school system. The particular case that we will bring to your attention is that of the educational environment in UTA Gagauzia, Republic of Moldova, where students of Gagauz or Bulgarian ethnicity study at school certain disciplines in the Gagauz language, others in the Romanian language, which is the official language in Moldova, and other disciplines are studied in Russian, due to the lingua franca status that the Russian language had for the former Soviet countries. In most cases, one or two modern languages (English, Spanish or French) are added to those languages mentioned above.

Keywords:

Motivation, multilingual study environment, school drop out.