Motivating University Students To Improve Their English Language Communicative Competence

Language communicative competence usually contains four components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence, and how to effectively improve students'language communicative competence has become one important goal of second and foreign language (L2) teaching and learning. There have been many years since communicative Language Teaching (CLT) entered foreign language education in China, however, great achievements have not been made and student's communicative competences are still dissatisfactory. Regarding university students in China, after they enter university, because there is no such instrumental strategy like university entrance examination as stimulating factor, their English learning lack enough motive, and some students are even unwilling to learn English and they do not know how to improve their English communicative competence. Some examinations, such as Band Four and Band Six examinations, entrance examination to postgraduate study, can bear the role of entrance examination to university to some extent. However, because they are not necessities, their motivational roles are not very obvious. During the actual teaching practice, the author realizes very clearly that it is very urgent to improve students'communicative competence, so is students'motivation in improving their communicative competence. With low level of motivation, students cannot make great effort to study and keep persistence, which results in little improvement in their communicative competence. Hence, how to motivate university students to improve their communicative competence should be an important task for teachers. There have been plenty of achievements with regard to the research on motivational strategies abroad, whereas most theories are not based on systematic empirical studies. In China, there have also been a lot of efforts and achievements in this area, but also very few empirical studies can be found. This study aims at filling in this gap. In the west, Professor D?rnyei, who is from the University of Nottingham of UK, can be a pioneer in researching motivational strategies. In his book"Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom"which was published in 2001, he summarizes systematically more than 100 motivational strategies in foreign language teaching and learning. Based on the strategies from this book and some other relevant research results, in association with the author's teaching experience, after the pilot study, 65 motivational strategies, which may be used by teachers to stimulate students'motivation in communicative competence, were specified. With elaborate-designed empirical investigation, the focus of this study is to find out how much importance teachers attached to these strategies and how often they implemented them in their teaching practice. In combination with relevant literature, its implications toward college English teaching were also explored.With regard to research methods, I consulted the similar empirical studies in the west, especially D?rnyei and Csizér (1998), and Cheng and D?rnyei(2007), and made some changes as well. The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative method includes 2 questionnaires, one for teachers and the other for students, because I think it should be more accurate to let students evaluate their teachers'strategies use, in case teachers would describe their instruction in a better than real light. In addition, this study also used the method of interview as the further study of the questionnaires, which provided in-depth data about the actual use of the strategies. In some degree, the interview can make up some deficiencies produced by the only method of questionnaire.The thesis begins with the relevant literature review on communicative competence and CLT, and particularly in the light of relevant research, issues of inhibiting CLT in China were analyzed. The literature related to motivation was then reviewed, including its definition, classification, its role in SLA, motivational strategies, etc, which provides the theoretical foundation for the study. The participants in the questionnaires were 82 teachers and 308 non-English major students from 3 universities. By deliberate organizing and conducting, I tried my best to avoid some errors which might result from wrong operation. The data were dealt with by means of SPSS software with careful statistics and analysis, and reliable results were produced. Teachers attached different importance to 65 motivational strategies, which is different from the results of D?rnyei and Csizér (1998), and Cheng and D?rnyei (2007), indicating that some strategies which are considered important in the west might not be regarded as being important in China, which shows that some strategies are culture-sensitive or even culture-dependent. By contrasting the results from both of the questionnaires, we can learn how often teachers actually use these strategies in the process of their teaching, and especially for every strategy, there is a deviation between importance and actual use. According to the results, teachers can adjust their instruction to avoid this deviation so that the more important a strategy is, the more attention we will pay to it in actual classroom practice. After that, in the second stage, I interviewed 3 university English language teachers who have different educational and working experiences. The interview further verifies the results of questionnaires and makes an in-depth exploration of some strategies.Based on the investigation results, the significance of the study is concluded, particularly its implications for the current college English language teaching. For example, regarding motivational strategies, teachers can't apply overseas research results or relevant theories mechanically to the teaching practice without considering the actual situation. We can popularize it into our teaching only when it can be certified in practice to be really useful. In addition, some well-know teaching methods and principles in CLT are discussed from the perspective of motivation improvement, for example, content-based instruction, learner autonomy enhancement, computer-assisted language learning, learner-centeredness, cooperative language learning, willingness to communicate, task-based language teaching, etc. It is concluded that all these methods, embodying some specific motivational strategies, are beneficial for motivation improvement. Hence, in order to motivate university students to improve their communicative competence effectively, teachers need to apply them into their teaching practice according to their specific teaching situation. The possible applications of the study by the author in actual teaching are briefly pointed out. For example, using the motivational strategies in teaching led to effective results, certifying the study results and relevant motivation theories.