Correlation Between Vocational College Students' English Learning Motivation, Learning Strategy And Performance On PRETCO

This paper reports on a survey of correlation between English language learning motivation, learning strategy and the performance on Practical English Test for Colleges (PRETCO)-Level A. The aim of the study is to provide theoretical evidence and some suggestions for English teachers in Higher Vocational Colleges. The subjects involved in this study are 252 second-year students from some Vocational College. Of these 252 students, there are 120 males and 132 females. They were enrolled in this college and began to study college English in September of 2006. In this survey, an English learning questionnaire, which consists of personal information, learning motivation scale, Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning(SILL) and the students performance on PRETCO-Level A was used to collect data. The following are the findings.Students in higher vocational colleges are not very highly motivated in their English learning. Generally, they hold moderate motivation. Relatively speaking, they hold very strong integrative motivation and instrumental motivation. They adopt all the six kinds of strategies with medium frequency. Relatively, they frequently adopt compensation strategy and affective strategy. The least popular strategies for them are meta-cognitive strategy and social strategy.Efficient students are highly motivated by integrative and internal factors, and they adopt strategies more frequently, especially compensation strategy, meta-cognitive strategy and cognitive strategy. Compared with male students, Female students are highly motivated by integrative and internal factors, and they use social strategy, compensation strategy, meta-cognitive strategy and affective strategy more frequently.There are positively significant correlations between integrative motivation and performance of PRETCO, internal motivation and performance of PRETCO. The correlations between performance on PRETCO and all of the learning strategies are positively significant. Among five learning motivations and six learning strategies, integrative motivation, external motivation and compensation strategy enter regression equation to predict students performance in English learning.