An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Learning Motivation Learning Strategy And Learning Achievement

For a long time, how to learn a foreign language successfully has been a dispute for foreign language teachers and researchers. Since 1970s, with the research interest's shift from the teacher-centered to the student-centered in foreign language teaching and learning, individual factors such as learning belief, learning strategy, motivation, intelligence, aptitude, personality, age, sex and first language level, which affect foreign language learning, are attracting more and more attention of many researchers. Only by studying those changeable factors, can we in fact concern about learners and their changes in learning process. Among individual factors, learning motivation and learning strategy have become important subjects for researchers in the field of SLA because of their direct or indirect influence on students' English learning.Consulting the previous literature documents, the author finds research is mainly centered on the relationship between learning strategy or learning motivation and learning achievement respectively. Less research is done on the relationship between learning motivation and learning strategy in English learning, especially for the subjects of three-year college students. In this thesis, By investigating 164 three-year college students of physics department in Linyi Normal University, the author focuses her study on the relationship between motivation and the choice of learning strategies in English learning through the research instruments of questionnaire and individual interview. The purpose is to study the frequency of learning motivation, learning strategy and their relationship in English learning in three-year college students, the lower-level English learners, so as to enrich the empirical research of English teaching and learning.The research result ultimately shows that 1) three-year college students use learning strategy and learning motivation at medium level. 2) The result indicates that students most prefer affective strategy; the learners learn English for its 'functional role' i.e. instrumental motivation is more prevalent. 3) There are different correlations between learning motivation components and learning strategy components. 4) Learning strategy and learning motivation have different correlations with learning achievement respectively and they have predicting power to learning achievement at different degree.The key findings of this thesis are expected to provide some new orientations for English teaching and learning, at the same time, providing some empirical support for the theoretical research. It is obvious that in English teaching practice, it is necessary to develop students' learning motivation and learning strategies especially for three-year college students.