A Study On The Relationship Between Project-based Learning And High School Student Motivation For Learning English

Learning motivation is one of the most decisive and dynamic factors for L2(second language)or FL(foreign language)learners(Wang 2011;Wang&Zhang 2005),and it would greatly affect their effectiveness in practicing or using L2,their initiative in participating in L2 learning process,and their confidence in overcoming difficulty(Oxford&Shearin 1994).However,in a setting of Chinese high schools where L2 refers to English,a phenomenon that a huge number of high school students lack English learning motivation has started to bother both the students and the teachers,and calls for solutions.Therefore,project-based learning(PBL)might be one of the approaches to stimulating students' motivation for learning English.And the study aims to probe into the relationship between PBL and student motivation for learning English by administering two sets of questionnaires and launching an interviewing.More specifically,the study tries to seek answers to the following three research questions:1)To what extent does PBL eventually affect high school student motivation for learning English?2)Which key features of the PBL model could affect the motivation?3)To what extent does gender affect the relationship between the features of PBL and student motivation for learning English?36 subjects in Grade One from a key senior high school were involved in the study with the new English learning model.First of all,they were asked to complete the first set of questionnaire as a pretest.The PBL model was carried out after that,then the students were asked to complete the first set of questionnaire again as a posttest to explore the changes of student English learning motivation and check if PBL could affect student motivation for learning English.Then,the second set of questionnaire was administered to find out the relationship between the features of the PBL model and student learning motivation,and the gender difference.And an interview was carried out to explore the causal relationship between the PBL model and the motivation.The quantitative data was under analysis of SPSS.18.The results of the quantitative and the qualitative data indicate that the anxiety of using English and the lack of goals of learning English are the most salient problems that 75.7%students are faced with in English learning motivation.While,student motivation for learning English has been facilitated in a broad sense since the implementation of PBL.And all the seven key PBL features are closely related to student English learning motivation,of which student-centeredness,collaboration and product-orientation have stronger influence in raising up the motivation.And gender could affect the motivation for learning English to some extent when it refers to the feature of collaboration.