The Teaching Effect Of Processing Instruction On Junior High School Students With Different Learning Motivation

For teachers,grammar teaching is the focus and difficulty in English instruction;for students,grammar lessons are boring.Due to the different usages of Chinese and English in terms of grammatical expression,it is quite difficult for English beginners to learn grammar,and many students have the problem of not being able to express English correctly with grammar.Van Patten proposed the Processing Instruction,which emphasized grammatical input and communication,and aimed to help learners establish the connection between the form and meaning of grammatical knowledge.At the same time,the affective factors of learners will affect the learning effect and teaching effect.As one of the key affective factors,motivation has a crucial impact on English learning.The relationship between motivation and instruction has become a research hotspot in recent years.The purpose of this paper is to explore the following two research questions:(1)What is the effect of Processing Instruction(PI)on junior high school students’ performance in learning the English simple past tense?(2)What are the differences in the teaching effect of Processing Instruction(PI)on junior high school students with different learning motivation?In this study,two natural classes participated in the experiment and were divided into Processing Instruction(PI)group and traditional instruction(TI)group.Students entering the PI group were required to complete an additional motivation scale.According to the motivation level,the PI group was divided into higher-motivated group and lower-motivated group.The contents of the teaching intervention were mainly simple past tense.Statistical tests found that:(1)The Processing Instruction was beneficial for junior high school students to learn the simple past tense.The comparison of pre-test and post-test showed that the Processing Instruction improved junior high school students’ scores in the past tense.However,although the PI group had higher average scores than the TI group in interpretation task and overall performance,there was no significant difference between the PI group and the TI group.(2)Students with high motivation perform better than students with lower motivation after the intervention of Processing Instruction.It was found that Processing Instruction were positively correlated with motivation.At the same time,students with different motivation performed differently after instruction.There is a significant difference between the scores in higher-motivated group and lower-motivated group.Motivation has an impact on student performance.The research results showed that the Processing Instruction was beneficial for junior high school students to learn the English simple past tense,which could provide a reference for the English grammar teaching of middle school students.At the same time,students with different motivation performed differently after instruction,motivation also had an important impact on instruction.In addition,the study also found the characteristics of middle school students’ learning motivation,which is helpful for teachers to stimulate students’ learning motivation in English teaching.