Effect Of Gender And English Proficiency Levels On The Type Of Motivation And Motivational Intensity Of Non-English Majors In A Chinese University

Motivation is a main research field in SLA, and has always been the spotlight in the eyes of scholars from home and abroad. Most of the studies in the past decades have aimed to investigate the motivation from its definition, classification and model building. They have also made extensive research on the effect of students'English learning motivation on their learning styles and strategies. However, they have made little effort in exploring the effect of gender and English proficiency level on students'learning motivation.This thesis, following the previous studies, has attempted to achieve the ensuing purposes: (1) to have a general description of students'types of motivation and motivational intensity , (2) to find out the effect of gender difference and proficiency levels on the learners'motivation types (MT) and motivational intensity (MI), and then analyze the possible reasons according to the related data. This study was carried out among 140 non-English majors from Jiangxi Science &Technology normal university. The questionnaire was adapted from the combination of Gardner's ATMB(1985) and Gao's questionnaire (2003). It took the students'CET-4 result as the criterion to measure the students'language proficiency. 20% of the students (number=28) were grouped into high achievers and another 20% of the students low achievers (number=28) respectively according to their CET-4 marks. Descriptive statistics, paired-sample t-test, independent sample t-test were computed in SPSS 11.0 to analyze the data.The results show that students still hold stronger instrumental motivation in English learning, which is similar to the previous conclusion by other scholars that Instrumental motivation is more characteristic of EFL learners. Further analysis also reveals that gender plays a very prominent role in motivation and females are instrumentally motivated and more inclined to the English learning with more energy and attention than males. In terms of proficiency levels, instrumental motivation still stands out as the main type of motivation between the high-achievers and low-achievers. And the independent paired t-test shows that there is no significant variation between instrumental motivation and integrative motivation in two groups. Therefore, we may conclude that the learners in both groups learn English for other extra reasons instead of intrinsic ones.The findings provide some helpful suggestions for the teaching practice. We firmly believe that the combination of instrumental motivation and integrative motivation will exert great influence on the English learning and teaching. For example, teachers can create the real and pleasant surroundings, like, toy store, theme-park, etc. for students to better experience the cultural difference and inspire their inner driving force to communicate. Besides, teachers ought to help students, especially those male students, find their weakness and set a proper goal toward English learning with constant encouragement. More praises and rewards ought to be given to those who do not perform well in English learning, especially those shy boys who are very afraid to be laughed by their peers. Telling a joke or playing some interesting games before the class will be very helpful to relax them and lower their affective-filler for further development of the study.