The Influence Of Achievement Motivation On EFL Learning Strategy Use In Vocational School

With the shift of the studying focus from teachers and teaching to learners and learning in the researching filed of the Applied Linguistics, second language/foreign language learners'learning process and individual differences have been widely emphasized. Learning strategy is considered to be the essential element to greatly influence the effect of foreign language learning among all the factors. However, teachers usually lay more emphasis on teaching while neglecting the students'learning cognition process and methodology. Therefore, there has been an urgent need for the teachers to have a better understanding of the students and combine the learning strategy teaching and training into the English teaching practice.Many studies show that motivation plays crucial roles in foreign language learning. Achievement motivation is defined as a concern with success in competition with some standard of excellence. According to Atkinson (1966), there are two types of motivation: the positive motivation to strive for success(Ms) and the negative inhibitory tendency to avoid failure (Mf). Although there has been an increasing amount of interest in the interrelationship of motivation and strategy use in L2, little has been known about the relationship between strategy use and achievement motivation. Anyhow, there exists a shortage of empirical studies on how achievement motivation affects strategy use in L2 learning.The vocational education plays an active role in our socialist economic construction. In addition, up to now the special group is often neglected by the researchers, and there have been few studies on their learning, so it is necessary to make a survey on the English learning strategies used by the secondary vocational school students. This can contribute to know the current situation about their learning strategies use and will offer the help for the future English teaching and learning.The study aims at answering two questions: 1.general tendencies in choice of strategies and correlation between strategies and proficiency. 2. the relations between achievement motivation and language strategy use, and the effect of different levels of achievement motivation on learning strategies. The subjects involved were 215 vocational school students. In this study, an English Learning Questionnaire, which is composed of three parts: Personal Information, Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Rebecca Oxford), and Achievement Motivation Scale (AMS) (T.Gjesme&R.Nygaard). The data was collected and analyzed by SPSS.Through data collection and analysis, the findings are summerized as follows:The general tendencies in choice of strategies are memory strategies, compensation strategies, cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies and social strategies. As for the relationship between strategy use and proficiency, the study indicates significant levels of association for four of six types of learning strategies, i.e. memory, cognitive, metacognitive and compensation strategies. Besides, the study indicates that learners who have passed EST use all the six categories of learning strategies more often than those who have failed. While significant differences are only found in memory strategies and compensation strategies between these two groups of students.With regard to the correlation between achievement motivation and the use of learning strategies, Motive to achieve success (Ms) is positively and significantly correlated with all the six types of learning strategies, and each correlation is significant at the .01 level. Motive to avoid failure (Mf) is negatively correlated with all the strategies but it has no significant relationships. Different levels of achievement motivation have an effect on the six categories of learning strategies.This study does provide evidence that achievement motivation affects the use of learning strategies. Therefore, it is advisable for teachers to be aware of not only what strategies learners tend to use but what factors affect learners to use them as well. Teachers are advised to stimulate learners'motivation, particularly achievement motivation.It is hoped that this study can benefit language teachers, learners and researchers to a certain degree and can spark more research in this area in the future.