Communicative Language Teaching Impact on Students’ Cognition and Writing Motivation in Translation Practice

Language teaching aims to develop communication competence that results in interaction. From the higher education perspective, students are not merely expected to be competent in their particular disciplines but also capable of interacting with people in global cultures. Thus, the teacher should take into consideration the essentials of EFL teaching methods. For this purpose, this study investigates the students’ cognitive involvement and motivation in translation activities as part of language learning. The sample group consisted of 62 (control group = 30; experiment group = 32) students from the engineering and economics departments of two universities in North Sumatra, Indonesia. We designed the materials for translation tasks using Indonesian as the source language (L1) to be translated into English (L2). We distributed a questionnaire consisting of 15 items after the completion of each translation task session. The questionnaire items were developed to investigate cognitive involvement and motivation and were categorized into four factors. We analyzed, summarised, and compared student responses on each item. The findings reveal that cognition involvement and writing motivation improved with the application of communicative language teaching in translation classes.