A Study On Relationship Of Non-English Majors' EFL Learning Motivation To Their Gender And Language Proficiency

Motivation is a main field of individual differences (IDs) in SLA research. It plays a significant role in students' classroom performance and decides the amount of effort students exert in language learning. Previous research in the last decades has examined motivation from its definition, classification and model building. Though satisfying results have been obtained in identifying the relationship between motivation and other factors in IDs, only a few researchers have explored the effect of gender differences on students' learning motivation. The contribution of motivation to learners' language proficiency (LP) varies with language learning settings. It's still uncertain how well motivation might predict learners' LP in the Chinese context.This thesis extends the previous studies, trying to achieve the following purposes: (1) to have a basic understanding of students' reasons for learning English and their efforts paid in this learning process, (2) to explore the effect of gender differences on learners' motivation types (MT) and motivational intensity (MI), and (3) to find the MT and MI's predictive power on learners' LP. This study was carried out among 190 non-English major students from four departments in Jiangxi Normal University. A language learning motivation questionnaire was constructed based on Gardner(1985) to examine students' responses on 19 items related to MT and MI. CET-4 pre-test result was taken as the criterion to measure students' language proficiency. Descriptive statistics, t-test, Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple linear regression analysis in SPSS 11.0 for windows were employed to analyze the data.The results of the study show that students hold stronger instrumental reasons towards English learning, which is similar with the traditional view that instrumental motivation is more characteristic of EFL learners. However, inconsistent with the previous findings, instrumental motivation causes no effect on students' MI and LP. Language proficiency, correlated significantly with students' integrative motivation and...