The Impact Of Achievement Motivation On Project-based Autonomous Learning

In view of the education reform and the ever-fast development of modern society,the requirement for the educational qualifications emphasizes more on their ability of autonomous learning and lifelong learning to better adapt to challenging situation.To meet this need,students should be the center of teaching and their subjective initiative should be fully motivated.Only when the interest in study is motivated by students themselves,can the study process be autonomous and thus,autonomous learning strategies be effective.While strategies of cultivating students' autonomous learning ability vary a lot,being an innovative and empirically proven instructional teaching method,project-based learning(PBL)is effective in promoting the simultaneous acquisition of language,content and skills,and is now widely adopted in the field of foreign language teaching.The National Business English Practice Contest(NBEPC)is one of the kind,which targets at business English majors nation-wide,aiming to promote their skills of autonomous learning and problem solving.In consideration of these situations,this essay combines the fields of motivation and PBL in autonomous learning to study their relationships,more specifically,on how motivation impacts the outcome of project-based autonomous learning and on which autonomous learning strategies are more effective in generating the outcome.This essay builds on the hypothesis that the internal motivational constructs and the key features of project-based learning model work together can improve theautonomous learning achievement,in this essay,the result of the 2017 NBEPC.For this essay,internal motivation is students' achievement motivation in participating the2017 NBEPC,while some students have higher achievement motivation and the others have lower achievement motivation.And as the NBEPC is a kind of project-based learning,it manifests the characteristics of the PBL,which is valuing the voice of students,encouraging students to use innovative and integrated instruments during learning and apply effective autonomous learning strategies.Specifically,the four research questions formulated are: under the setting of project-based autonomous learning,1)will students with higher achievement motivation make more use of autonomous learning strategies than those with relatively lower achievement motivation? 2)will students using more autonomous learning strategies score higher in the contest results than those adopting less autonomous learning strategies? 3)which phase or phases in the process of autonomous learning are more decisive in generating favorable project results? 4)Are there any individual strategies significantly effective to their contest results? If so,what are they?The research targets at the third-year business English majors in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies,who were about to take part in the 2017 NBEPC.For the present study,385 students are involved in the data collecting process,while 70 students of them in 10 contest teams were taken as focus subjects for analysis.5groups have rather high scores in achievement motivation,as each of them score higher than 15,and 5 groups have rather low scores in achievement motivation,aseach of them score lower than-5.Data collected by questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS,statistics are analyzed and research findings are concluded: 1)teams with higher achievement motivation have better application of autonomous learning strategies in preparation for the contest.2)students using more autonomous learning strategies score higher in the contest results.3)All three phases of autonomous learning have significantly relevance with the contest result,while the relevance between performance phase and the contest result is at a slightly higher level.4)All three autonomous learning strategies studied by this essay show significant relevance with the contest result,while the significance level of the knowledge application strategy is slightly higher than the other two.For specific strategies of each type,while all of them are significant relevant to the contest result,the source collection strategy of knowledge application strategy has the highest level of significance with the contest result.Based on these findings,suggestions are proposed on how to promote students' achievement motivation,to instruct them to better apply autonomous learning strategies,and on how to be more effectively self-instructed in the process of project-based autonomous learning,hoping to make contribution to the process of exploring innovative language teaching model.