The purpose of this paper is to investigate the demotivating factors of students attending a university located in a local area in Korea. The interviews with 17 students who are in three different proficiency groups reveal 8 demotivating factors: 'learning difficulty', 'exam-oriented class', 'low test scores', 'low confidence', 'memorization', 'learning material', 'teacher', and 'grammar translation method'. The main demotivating factor is 'learning difficulty'. Half of the students who mentioned this state that they experienced the learning difficulty when they advanced to middle school from elementary school. The majority of other demotivating factors are closely related to the Korean education system under which both teachers and students do not have much autonomy. The 'teacher' factor which was identified as the main demotivating factor in other studies conducted in western countries is not the main demotivator in this paper. In the distribution of demotivating factors, there do not exist any big differences among the different proficiency groups but it is shown that the low proficiency students experienced demotivation earlier than the higher proficiency students.

• Kyunghee Yeo(Catholic University of Daegu)