I had a demotivating experience in a Russian course in my final year of undergrad. The class comprised three heritage speakers who could speak fluently but struggled with writing, one other non-native speaker, and me. I was by this time used to class discussions being held exclusively in Russian, but with most of the class being able to speak fluently I quickly became demotivated. I was self conscious about speaking in class, aware of how amateurish I sounded compared to the other students. I could follow the discussions but avoided participating because I felt I’d slow everyone else down.
The homework assignments for that class didn’t help my motivation. Even the heritage speakers complained that our reading assignments from Russian novels and historical texts were too long. I couldn’t keep up with the work and eventually gave up trying to complete it. I was frustrated with the volume of assignments and felt it unfair that my work was being graded against that of heritage speakers who I felt clearly had the upper hand.
Being in a class with only non-native speakers would have helped my motivation a lot (though it probably wouldn’t have been practical for the university to create a special class for heritage speakers). Having classmates whose abilities were more similar to mine would have made the learning environment feel less intimidating and would have made me more comfortable participating in class. A more reasonable workload would have helped too; I would have felt more motivated to complete my assignments if they hadn’t seemed so hopelessly huge.