ACADEMIC MOTIVATION OF FIRST YEAR PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The paper presents the results of empirical study aimed to find out academic motivation features of first year pedagogical university students. The relevance of the research is based on the necessity to build a more effective future teachers training system and to eliminate the tendency of the students' learning interest decline and unwillingness to work by specialty after graduation. The research was held at Volodymyr Vynnychenko Central Ukrainian State Pedagogical University and involved 41 1st year students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages. The following methods were used: “Academic motivation questionnaire” by T. Gordeeva, “Profession choice motives” by V. Semychenko and psychodiagnostic technique aimed at identifying the personality orientation type by T. Danilova. The study showed that two-thirds of all students have optimal academic motivation. At the same time there were disclosed several negative tendencies: 1) humanistic personality orientation is not inherent even to those students who belong to the group with high level of intrinsic and low level of extrinsic motivation; 2) the substantial links between the personality orientation and academic motives are nearly absent, which evidences the students' indetermination as for their professional orientation; 3) the most powerful profession choice motive for the students of the Foreign Languages Department is the possibility to apply their language skills aside from teacher's profession, which indirectly points out that students aren't interested in becoming pedagogues. In general, these facts indicate the first-year students' motivation immaturity, which is natural due to their age psychodynamics. The study results can be used for working-out the first-year students' psychological maintenance based on their motivation profiles.