A Research On The Foreign Language Learning Motivation Of Non-English Majors In Chinese Context And Teachers' Inspiring Strategies

There is no doubt that English has become the first international language in the world, playing a significant role in politics, economy, culture, science, technology, education and some other social aspects. In today's China English is the most dominant foreign language in every field of our society. Hundreds of millions of Chinese, young or old, keep learning English at or out of school, and many others attend various kinds of English training agencies or participate in different English examinations. It seems that English education, including English teaching, training, examination and the rest has been part of daily life of many Chinese. But when it comes to the effects of English education, we have a very negative discovery. Most of the English learners complain that learning English is a time and energy-consuming process, where they can not enjoy much pleasure. Instead they keep feeling depressed, frustrated, inefficient, and even bored. This is the same case in colleges or universities. Based on her own experience, the author knows that nearly all the non-English majors spend over half of their spare time in learning English--a single subject and leave their major subjects little time. In this case, of course, a sick sense of English language will be developed among the students, which will make them lose their interests in learning it and gradually they will perform poorly in the English classroom. This is true in most of the colleges or universities. So what causes us to deeply think about is how to make the English learners in China (including college students or others out of school) completely motivated and become efficient learners, not having their efforts in vain.Thus how to inspire the learners'learning motivation is at the essence of the whole issue mentioned above. If well motivated, the learners will make every effort to learn and meanwhile enjoy the learning process very much; although not instructed or supervised by teachers, they will also learn by themselves all the time. The research of foreign language learning motivation started five decades ago in Europe and America and spread rapidly into the other places. Many scholars from all countries contributed to the development of the foreign language learning researches and theories, the most prominent of whom are the Canadian scholar Robert Gardner and the Hungarian scholar Zoltán D?rnyei. The learning motivation theories were introduced to China in the 1980s and developed fruitfully due to the persistent work of those involved, such as Professor Gao Yihong and Professor Wen Qiufang. These theories have been applied to our teaching practices and achieved certain accomplishment. But all these motivation theories, no matter home or abroad, are too theoretical and macro-oriented, and sometimes they are not very applicable to the teaching and learning practices. However, what we most need in English teaching and learning should be some concrete measures which are easy to be mastered and conducted by both the teachers and the learners. So this thesis attempts to provide some practical and applicable teaching measures, for instance, what the teachers and students need to do in order to increase their efficiency. Based on the motivation theories and the author's own teaching experience the author hope that it will lead to more inspiration and discussion on this topic, and meanwhile it also tries to point out that English teachers must change their role from a language instructor to a learning inspirer.