A Study On Demotivation In English Learning Of Non-english Major College Students

Learning motivation is one of the dynamic factors, which has a great effect on language learning and it determines learners’ achievements directly. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of demotivation appears gradually in college English classes. It not only reduces English learning effect but also brings troubles to teacher’s teaching.Therefore, more and more foreign and domestic scholars begin to focus on the phenomenon of demotivation and analyze the specific causes of demotivation.The present research is supported by Reinforcement Theory, D?rnyei’s Three-Level Model Theory and Attribution Theory etc., and both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in the research. Questionnaires and interviews are conducted to 4 English teachers and 378 non-English major college students to investigate the phenomenon of demotivation. The present research aims to identify the current situation of demotivation in college English classes and the specific influencing factors of demotivation. It also tries to explore the differences between more demotivated students and less demotivated ones with regard to demotivating factors and to find out the correlations between students’ demotivation degree and their English proficiency. Then the collected data is analyzed by software SPSS 16.0, including descriptive statistics, factor analysis, regression analysis,Independent Samples T-Test and correlation analysis. According to the results of data analysis, 20 students with different demotivation degree are interviewed to verify the findings of the quantitative study.The major findings can be concluded as follows: firstly, demotivation is a common phenomenon among non-English major college students; secondly, the causes of demotivation can be classified into eight categories: teachers’ teaching, failed experience in English learning, cultural communication, learning environment, language input,characteristics of class, lack of interest and learning tasks, in which the factor of lack of interest is the most dominant one while the teacher-related factors rank the second place;thirdly, there are significant differences between more demotivated students and less demotivated ones in terms of demotivating factors. Compared with the less demotivated learners, the more demotivated learners are more likely to be affected and they usually attribute the influencing factors of demotivation to external factors such as learningenvironment factors and teacher-related factors etc. However, the less demotivated learners usually ascribe the influencing factors to internal factors(intrinsic motivation); finally,there is significantly negative correlation between SLA students’ demotivation degree and their English proficiency, namely, the demotivation degree for high proficiency students is low while for low proficiency students is high. Some specific and feasible suggestions for teachers and students are provided based on the research results to motivate and maintain students’ learning motivation.