An Investigation On The Current Situation Of The Tibetan College Students' English Learning Motivation

This study was undertaken to investigate the current situation of the Tibetan college students'English learning motivation and the underlying factors that lead to the current situation of those Tibetan college students'English learning motivation. The research questions to be addressed in the study are the following:1.What is the current situation of the Tibetan college students'English learning motivation?2. What are the underlying factors that lead to the current situation of those Tibetan college students'English learning motivation?The research design included two parts: the quantitative design and the qualitative design. The former was a questionnaire, and the latter was an interview. The questionnaire was distributed to 409 students of two Tibetan colleges.The qualitative research included two interviews, including 16 interviewees; ten of them are students and six are teachers.The major findings of the present study are as follows:1. Most of the Tibetan students don't have a good self-concept about their English learning and often feel anxious in English class. They lacked intrinsic motivation. Many Tibetan college students learn English only for the purpose of passing English exams, getting high scores and finding good jobs. In other words, they were only driven by extrinsic motivation instead of intrinsic motivation.2. There are some underlying factors responsible for the Tibetan college students'English learning motivation. The backward Tibetan educational environment, and above all, the negative transfer of the two target languages—English and Chinese in terms of grammars and syntactical structures combined to make English learning all the more difficult for the Tibetan students. Such difficulties badly affect those Tibetan college students'intrinsic English learning motivation.3. The negative transfer of Tibetan and Chinese pronunciations and especially the negative effect of Indian unstandard pronunciation on Tibetan college students'English pronunciation cause those students to have a bad self-concept about their English learning, which in turn reduces their interest in learning English and their intrinsic English learning motivation.4. Lack of professional Tibetan English teachers also negatively affects the English learning motivation of Tibetan college students. Most of the English teachers in Tibet are Chinese; they have not received professional training about classroom teaching techniques and have no idea about how to teach Tibetan students effectively. Those non-Tibetan English teachers explain English language points in Chinese, which is also a target language for Tibetan students to learn. Such unsatisfactory classroom instructions are also responsible for the lack of intrinsic English learning motivation on the part of the Tibetan college students.The present study is limited in three ways:1. No mention has been made of role of the curriculum in stimulating English learning motivation in Tibet.2. Though students interviewees were selected according to their average English scores of every exam, it might not ensure that the subjects could represent the population 100%.3. There is limited literature about Tibetan students'learning motivation...