A Motivation Study On Non-English Majors

"Given motivation, anyone can learn a language" (Skehan, l989:49). There can be little doubt that motivation is one of the vital factors in the learning process, which helps to determine the level of proficiency achieved by different learners. No one can achieve any long-term learning goals without learning motivation. For this reason, quite a lot of researchers have done lots of researches on learner's motivation from various perspectives, such as Gardner, Lambert, Dornyei, Skinner and so on. Many researchers abroad or home also placed their research emphasis on motivation stimulating, but few of them gave many practical implications which can guide young teachers' teaching practice and few of them have made such research directly from students' point of view, especially that of a new group of students in Chinese independent colleges such as Yunnan Normal University Business School (YNNUBS).According to the interview conducted in YNNUBS, most students are bored with their English lessons. They are frequently absent from class or indifferent to most of the activities in the English classroom. They are convinced through past failures that their attempts to change the situation are useless and thus have learnt not to try again. As time passes, they lose their motivation in learning English. Another feature of YNNUBS is the average age of the English teachers in this school is under 35, and nearly all the teachers have complaints about their students, but they don't know how to deal with their classes. Nobody tries to study the students'special learning motivation on English and to activate the students'interest in English.Upon this point, this paper is designed to find out the types of the YNNUBS non-English major students'English learning motivation and factors influencing their English learning motivation, especially to figure out how teachers affect students'learning motivation, to find out the practical ways which can really give these young teachers, especially those from independent colleges, some help during their teaching process, and more importantly, is to find out this group of college students'own thoughts about their learning motivation activation. The author believes that the really effective ways to stimulate college students' English learning motivation are those students themselves.Data analysis and mean value counting reveal that YNNUBS students' English learning motivation is quite mixed with both integrative and instrumental motivation. According to the investigation results, the basic stimulating degree frame is drawn, which includes three aspects: students'attitude and self-confidence, learning environment and teachers'influence in English learning. Based on the literature review and the present study, some practical motivational strategies are listed, which are proposed from four aspects: teaching materials, students' self-esteem or self-confidence, the teachers and the classroom atmosphere. Concrete suggestions are given according to these four aspects, which are assumed to give some help to teachers in understanding how to motivate their students in foreign language teaching environment.In a word, the whole paper aims to find out effective ways which can promote YNNUBS students' English learning motivation and meanwhile give teachers some practical suggestions which can help them with their teaching process.