A Study Of The Influence Of Vocational College Students' Motivation On Their Oral English Proficiency

Learners'oral proficiency of second or foreign language is a subject that drew attention to itself as early as the beginning of the 19th century. Researchers began to find that after years of language learning, the students can only read and write to a limited extent. They can't use the target language to communicate with other people. The English that most Chinese have learned is'mute English'. The reasons that students acquire low oral competence are no doubt various and multiple. Among them is motivation. Motivation has been recognized as one of the most influential affective variables that lead to individual learning differences.Ever since people have realized the importance of motivation in second or foreign language learning, great deals of theoretical and empirical studies both at home and abroad are carried out. Among them, relatively fewer existing motivational researches relevant to oral English proficiency have been done and consequently the relationship between motivation and oral English proficiency has not been sufficiently explored. Moreover, most of the studies on motivation are conducted in colleges and universities, fewer researches take vocational college students as their research subjects. As a quickly expanding group, vocational college students own learning experiences and techniques unique to themselves. Thus they are chosen as subjects in this investigation. Considering their specific learning aims, that is, they study English not for doing further academic research but for using it as a tool to facilitate learning other courses or just communicate, their spoken English is of relatively greater importance than the other three skills (listening, reading and writing). Therefore, the research mainly takes vocational college students'oral English into consideration, aiming at investigating, identifying and analyzing their general motivation types and motivation intensity, the relationship between motivation and oral English proficiency and the motivational discrepancies between high- and low-proficiency groups, thus better understands the influence of vocational college students'motivation on their oral English proficiency.In Chapter One, an overview of motivation is provided as the background knowledge for the research of motivation. Some fundamental concepts and theories of motivation are simply introduced. Besides, the relationship between motivation and second language learning, that is the importance of motivation in second language learning, and both internal and external factors affecting motivation to oral English learning, are touched upon. All those pave the way for the investigation conducted in Chapter Two.Based on the fundamental analysis of motivation, an investigation is carried out in Chapter Two, attempting to investigate, identify and analyze general motivation types and motivation intensity of vocational college students, the relationship between motivation and oral English proficiency and the motivational discrepancies between high- and low-proficiency groups, thus better understands the influence of vocational college students'motivation on their oral English proficiency. In this chapter, backgrounds of subjects, instruments, procedures and process of data collection are discussed beforehand. Chapter Three describes major results and findings of the investigation, including motivation types, motivation intensity, the relationship between motivation and oral English proficiency, so that we can find the influence of students'motivation on their oral English proficiency.Chapter Four provides some suggestions for oral English teaching based on the findings of Chapter Three, including some useful strategies to generate students'intrinsic motivation, which is found to be most closely related to oral English proficiency; some suggestions to enhance students'extrinsic motivation, which is owned by majority of vocational college students, and is also found to be beneficial in English learning. As to the result of high mean of situational motivation, some relevant measures are also taken together with the enhancement of students'intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.