A Study On Students' English Learning Motivation In Vocational & Technical Colleges

Learning motivation is a dynamic factor to push forward our students'learning activities. It enables students to concentrate on and be consistent with and enhance their endurance to frustration. It greatly influences students'learning attitude and positivity.As far as learning motivation is concerned, the Behavioral, Cognitive, Constructivism and Second Language Acquisition theories account for it from different perspectives. Therefore, a lot of researches appeared at home and abroad. There are plenty of researches on junior and senior middle school students'motivation, and many studies about non-English major college students and English major college students'motivation. However, it's comparatively lack of studies on vocational college students'English learning motivation. In addition, China, according to some economists, lies in great need of vocational talents, especially the blue-collar workers in the coming 50 years. The development of the higher vocational education is a necessity. At present, the higher vocational education which has developed quickly in recent years is an important part of the higher education in our country. The research in this field is necessary and urgent nowadays. On the basis of previous studies, the author categorizes, in terms of the psychological characters of vocational and technical college students and the real circumstances of vocational English teaching, the vocational college students'learning motivation into four basic types: cognitive motivation,self-realization,attachment motivation and compelling motivation. A sample questionnaire investigation is carried out in Vocational & Technical Colleges of Xi'an Technical University and Northwest University. To analyze the data we've collected, with the assistance of SPSS 13.0---- a sort of computer software, several descriptive statistics methods are put in use such as relative analysis, factor analytic methods,Descriptive Statistics,Independent Sample T-test,ANVOA and Correlations etc.. The major conclusions are as follows:1. The order of the students'strength of motivations in vocational & technical colleges is: Attachment motivationï¹¥Cognitive motivationï¹¥Self-realizationï¹¥compelling motivation.2. Sex and background can effect the students'learning motivation. Generally speaking, female's learning motivation is much stronger than male's in the cognitive motivation,self-realization and attachment motivation; The female's means is higher than the male's, especially the first two types of motivation. What's more, in regional terms, the students coming from middle and small cities have a strong cognitive motivation, the second is the ones who come from the countryside; the last one is from big cities. That is to say, the middle-and-small-city students'cognitive motivation is the strongest among the three groups, while big city students'cognitive motivation is the weakest among them.3. Interest has a Positive (+) correlation with cognitive and self-realization. There is no correlation between attachment motivation and interest. Furthermore, compelling motivation has a negative(-) correlation with cognitive,self-realization and attachment motivation.4. At present most students have no interest in English in vocational college; the main reason is that students can't find the efficient learning methods. Second, poor foundation in high schools is another factor baffling them, so that they fail to follow the teacher in the classroom.The author makes some suggestions by combining the survey result; in order to test whether these suggestions are feasible or not, the author did a teaching experiment. The teaching strategies are as follows: 1) building up the good relationship between teachers and students; 2) to instruct the students how to learn English; 3) to complement their past knowledge; 4) giving positive feedback to students timely; 5) stimulating students'achievement motivation; 6) helping students correct attribution; 7) establish a relaxed and cooperative atmosphere, etc.. The teaching experiment's result indicated that the scores of growth rate in experimental class are distinctly higher than those of controlling class. Compared with the students of the controlling class, the students of experimental class have a stronger cognitive motivation,self-realization and interest, a relatively weaker compelling motivation. To give distinction test to the results of the two teaching methods simultaneously, the conclusion is that the two teaching methods produce obviously different teaching effects.