AUTONOMY IN DRIVING ONLINE MOTIVATION FOR JAPANESE LANGUAGE LEARNING

Online usage in education, that are the result of rapid development of digital platform, play a vital role in Japanese language learners’ motivation. In Japanese language learning, learners’ participation and persistency are highly influenced by their autonomy. However, the relationship between online learning and autonomy has yet to be understood clearly. Thus, this study is done to investigate the influence of autonomy towards online motivation among Japanese language learners. This research employed a quantitative research approach through a survey from Fowler that utilized a 5 Likert-scale. Data were collected from 206 respondents from a public university in Malaysia. The findings show that online motivation has a significant positive relationship with autonomy. The higher autonomy a learner has, the greater motivation and participation they have in their classroom. This research offers current literature with empirical evidence on the relationship between autonomy and online motivation for Japanese language learning. This research also provides suggestions to instructors and curriculum designer when developing autonomy-related online Japanese language learning environments.