A Survey Of First-year English Major's Learning Motivation At A Private College

Since the 20th century, the theory of motivation has been very popular in China. It is strongly believed and advocated that the study of learning motivation would be very promising and constructive in the future and playing a great and decisive role in English education development in China. At the same time, facing the opportunities and challenges offered by the globalization, China is in the great need of professional talents who, along with their own major, have the good command of English as their second language to communicate with different people in different fields of international exchange. Thus, English teaching are highly expected to contribute to Chinese education system and motivating the whole atmosphere for Chinese students especially those from the private colleges.In order to meet the need of training students with such high quality, it is quite urgent to practise, and take suitable measures to stimulate the learning motivation of students from private college because the students there are generally inferior to those in public colleges in ability for learning English.At present time, there are quite many research papers in which researchers from home and abroad illustrated a lot on learning motivation. Here, the author of this paper tries to study the problems on learning motivation of students from private colleges in China, and manages to answer these questions as below:1. What are the characteristics of first-year English major's learning motivation? And whether there is a difference between male and female students from private colleges.2. What factors affect the students'learning motivation?3. Are the factors that affected the learning motivation of freshmen implicative to teachers'teaching work in the future?This paper employed the qualitative and quantitative research methods to study the learning motivation of freshmen from the angle of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. 122 students from grade one participated in the survey. Ten of them attended the interview and exposed their real thoughts about present state of learning motivation, which also enhances the reliability of this research. Then, the results of the research about the learning motivation were produced and analyzed on roots. At the meantime, the motivational strategies which are only intended for the freshmen were put forward, which will be a referential value to private colleges for improving its teaching quality in English course. The results out of this research indicate the present level of learning motivation of freshmen and the relevant problems appeared:1. The majority of first-year English majors show a high level of learning motivation but there is no obvious inclination for one single learning motivation among them.2. Among the freshmen, the only variable has nothing to do with the choices of learning motivation for freshmen.3. Quite a number of freshmen can not make sure whether they are interested in learning English.At the same time, some feasible proposals are put forward for the future research:1.) The present study still has limitations. For instance, the time for this study is limited; the reliability needs to be improved because participants are only the first-year students of the same college, further researches should be carried out by sampling more students from different private colleges.2) The study here has only adopted a very simple method for investigation on learning motivation by giving just a descriptive illustration. However, other research methods should be used in the future studies.