A Study On Intrinsic/Extrinsic Motivation And Motivational Intensity Of Non-English Majors In Vocational College

In recent years, with the development of psycholinguistics and foreign language teaching, researchers'attention in second language acquisition has shifted from how to teach to how to learn. Language learners have become the center of language teaching and learning. A lot of researches have been carried out on learners'individual differences, especially on the role of the affective factors such as motivation and attitude in foreign language learning. Learners'motivation has been regarded as one of the most important affective variables that influence learners'language learning achievements.Most Chinese studies on foreign language learning motivation have taken undergraduates as the subjects, but few have investigated vocational Non-English majors'intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In China, the vocational education is more and more important and the number of vocational college students has been increased greatly. However, most of these students'English is relatively weak and they have many different characteristics compared with the undergraduates. Therefore, this thesis takes the vocational non-English majors as the subjects.The current thesis is based on the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation introduced by Deci and Ryan and the previous studies. It aims to explore the vocational college non-English majors'motivation types and motivation intensity, attempting to achieve the following purposes: (1) to have a general characteristic of learning motivation type and motivational intensity, (2) to find the correlation among intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, motivational intensity and language achievements, and (3) to explore the motivational differences between low achievers and high achievers, between females and males.The research was carried out among 195 non-English majors at a Vocational College in Jiangxi through a questionnaire survey. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient, paired-sample t-test and independent-sample t-test in SPSS 11.5 were computed to analyze the data. The results show that most non-English majors had higher extrinsic motivation than intrinsic motivation and exerted much effort to improve English. However, language proficiency correlated significantly with students'intrinsic motivation and motivational intensity. Motivational differences were discovered to exist between high achievers and low achievers and between females and males. High achievers were more intrinsically motivated while low achievers were more extrinsically motivated. As to the differences in efforts, high achievers exerted more efforts than low achievers to improve their English level. Females are more intrinsically motivated than males and expend more effort to learn English than males.According to the results, the author gives some suggestions to vocational college English teaching practice. For example, teachers can take effective measures to develop the students'intrinsic motivation. Teachers should try to establish the good relationship with the students and create the pleasant and natural learning environment to stimulate their inner force to learn English.