A Study Of Relationship Between Students' Learning Motivation, Effort, Ideal-self And Their Learning Achievements

English learning is a complex dynamic process which involves not only students'but teachers'work. In the English teaching and learning, the teachers are often faced with those students who are demotivated and can not achieve satisfactory results of English learning. It has been an important research topic of how to arouse students'motivation, sustain their effort and get the ideal learning achievement.On the basis of an extensive review of related literature, the study attempts to look into the interrelations between Chinese students'English motivation, ideal selves and learning efforts. With the expanding of the university, the college education is not an elite education any more. In other words, many common students or so-called poor students have the access to the university. These students'motivation, learning effort, and ideal self should be taken into account if we want to upgrade the overall level of college English teaching and learning.In this study the subjects are 260 non-English major freshmen from Changchun University of Technology which adopts the graded-education. The instruments used in this study are tests including college entrance exam and achievement exam and a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire consisting of 50 items developed from Gao Yihong's research. The qualitative data are collected by the longitudinal interviews and students'compositions on the topic of ideal language self. One statistical package employed for data analysis is SPSS. First, reliability analysis is performed and then a detailed descriptive analysis for a general view of the subjects is made. The interrelationship between the variables is computed by correlation analysis and the analysis of the demotivation and factors influencing the ideal self.The results firstly show that students from this university have motivation in English learning as a whole, and instrumental and exam motivations rank as the top two types. Motivation and ideal self influence the learning achievement positively through learning effort. Motivation, learning effort and ideal self are correlated with the language learning achievement. However, most students are demotivated, especially the students from improving classes. Almost all the students have ideal selves, but the ideal self of the students who are from experimental classes is stronger than those from improving classes.