A Survey Of Chinese College Non-English Majors' English Learning Motivation

Foreign language becomes more and more important in the world, and research on foreign language learning and teaching became quite a few teachers' and researchers' main concern. They have carried out a lot of research on learners' individual differences which covers these cognitive, affective and biological characteristics, especially on the role of the affective factors such as motivation and attitude in foreign language learning. And motivation has been considered a key factor to successful language learning. Students with strong motivation can always achieve greater success. But, what is motivation? What are the different factors that contribute to motivation? How do these factors influence motivation?With these questions, I conducted the literature review, found that different researchers have different views on the exact meaning of motivation. Motivation has been defined as inner drive or desire that moves one to a particular action, as certain needs to attain the goal, as the learners' orientation regarding the goal of learning a second language. From different dimensions, motivation can be classified into integrative and instrumental, intrinsic and extrinsic, etc. The behavioral, humanistic, cognitive and social learning theories account for "what is motivation" from different perspectives. Learner motivation is influenced by various factors including sociocultural factors, classroom environment factors and internal factors. And the most important one is internal factors. The related theories include goal setting theory, self-efficacy theory and self-worth theory.Now in our foreign language teaching, many teachers complain about students' lack of motivation, lack of enthusiasm for learning. Most of college students have to learn English in order to pass examinations in university, especially CET-4. It seems that getting the degree (instrumental motivation) is the major motivation for Chinese college students to learn English. Students don't work hard until the approaching of the examinations. After they pass the examination, they put English away again. Clearly, it is impossible to arouse students' learning motivation by enforcement. What can we do? In answer to this question, a survey was conducted to better understand the motivation types of Chinese college students, the motivational differences between male learners and female learners, and the motivationaldifferences between learners from the city and those from the countryside, and then to find out the effective ways to arouse the students' learning motivation.This thesis is composed of four chapters apart from the introduction and conclusion. In the introduction the author explains why the research on this subject is decided on. In the conclusion the whole thesis is summarized. Chapter one presents the general studies of motivation. This chapter attempts a comprehensive analysis of motivation which includes its definition, classification, sources, some major theories and its relationship with language learning achievement. Chapter two deals with the methodology of the survey including introduction, objectives, subjects, instruments and procedure. The subjects of this survey are 148 second-year non-English majors in Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering. Each of them was given a questionnaire. The collected data are processed by SPSS and analyzed by factor analysis to explore the motivation types. Chapter three is centered on the results and discussion of the survey, which is composed of motivational differences between male and female learners, main types of motivation of non-English majors, analysis of motivational variables and English achievement, general discussion and conclusion. The results show that (a) the basic motivation types are: instrumental motivation, cultural motivation and learning situational motivation; (b) learners from the countryside are more influenced by integrative motivation than those from the city; (c) interest in English plays an important role in learners' English acquisition; (d) female learners are more intere...