The relationship between attitude and motivation towards learning English and English achievement of the form four students in the Sarikei division

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between attitude and motivation
towards learning English and the achievement in English. 330 form four students are chosen as sample from the Sarikei Division secondary schools. All the form four students are chosen randomly from the population approximately 2119 students. Data was collected through a 46 -item questionnaires (2 sections : Attitude and Motivation). Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. For earlier stage, a pilot study was carried out with the 30 students to test on the questionnaires chosen from Attitude and Motivation Test Battery (Gardner, 2004). An analysis using the Coefficient reliability test (Cronbach's alpha) was conducted to ensure the reliability of the constructs on the attitudes (25 questions) and motivation (21 questions). The reliability of all question items in the questionnaire was at a high level, depicting .90. The independent sample t-test was used to see the differences of the attitude, motivation and students' achievement based on the gender. Pearson correlation method was used to analyse the relationships between the variable of attitude, motivation and students' achievement in English. The findings revealed the non-significant results of the attitude and motivation with the gender. This indicated that there was no clear difference between the male and female students in the aspects of their attitude and motivation that would influence the learning of English. Interestingly, there was a significant result on gender in the comparison with the achievement of the students whereby the female students performed better result in English than the male students. The Pearson correlation reflected the significant relationships for the variables of attitude, motivation and the achievement. The obvious relationship was shown between the attitude and motivation that conveyed the positive strong association