A Survey Of Learning Motivation Of Donggan Minority Students In Xi'an And Suggestions For Teaching

With the closely intercourse both in culture and trade between China and Central Asia, and the project’One Belt and One Road’was proposed, more and more Central Asian students come to China to study Chinese. Among them, the students from Donggan tribe are special. Dating back to 100 years ago, Donggan tribe were Chinese Hui who living in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces. Because of some special reasons, they were forced to move to northwest, in today’s Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Their language is complicated, constituted by the dialect of Shaanxi or Gansu, their national language and Russian. This paper aims to research Donggan students’academic motivations and make some teaching recommendations based on their characteristics of motivations.This research expounded the theories about L2 motivations both at home and abroad, and made a questionnaire according to the features of Donggan students. In the survey,100 students from 3 universities were tested and 84 valid questionnaires were taken back, including 41 Donggan students and 43 non-Donggan students from Central Asia. Through the analysis of the problems from the questionnaire, there are 5 academic motivations and 1 motivational behavior came out. The 5 academic motivations are interests and integrative motivation, development-oriented motivation, achievement motivation, internal motivation, external motivation and learning situation motivation. Then the results of the questionnaires were analyzed by statistical methods. The results are as follows:1、The Donggan students’dimension of academic motivation of learning Chinese differ from each other according to their different gender, age, level and types of learning.2、There is positive correlation between the students’interests and integrative motivation, development-oriented motivation, internal motivation and motivational behavior.3、Compared with non-Donggan Students from Central Asia, Donggan students have higher motivations overall, especially in the interests and integrative motivation, development-oriented motivation and external motivation. Thus it can be seen that Donggan students are not only more interested in Chinese culture, but also more willing to use Chinese as a tool for their own development. Obviously, Donggan students have more intense feelings to China.At last, the research gives some teaching suggestions on how to improve the motivation of Donggan students according to the results and relative theories.