| Affected by the exam-oriented system, present English teaching in primary schools is still bound in spoon-feeding teaching and students'passive learning. Teachers lay emphasis on theoretic explanation rather than students'ability. As a result, students' motivation and exploration are ignored, which limits their creative and practical abilities. While English teaching is far from grammar explanation, pronunciation practice and vocabulary learning, it counts only if students' communication ability is cultivated and language output is meaningful. That's why we are supposed to spare no efforts to research how to stimulate and sustain learners' motivation in the course of teaching. ARCS Model is in parallel with "Students centered" theory. The acronym ARCS refers to the four key elements of motivation:A, Attention; R, Relevance; C, Confidence; and S, Satisfaction. It is an example of a well-documented design theory that is centered on the importance of motivation to account for performance differences among learners. Teachers purposefully set related and familiar situation or atmosphere so as to interest students, activate their situational thinking and excite students' exploration. Thus, students can understand and use knowledge. Their confidence to solve problems and creative thinking are built up. Based on their experience, they can enjoy the satisfaction of completing a task. Combined with English teaching characteristics and teachers' practical experience, this thesis explores relative theories and operational strategies in the application of ARCS Model in Starting Line English teaching, aiming to make sure whether the application of ARCS Model can improve students' motivation and English achievement performance.The study was designed as a quasi-experiment, taking four natural classes of the third graders in a primary school as the subjects:two experimental classes (experimental group) and two control classes (control group). Through the whole training process, data about the learners' performances related to English learning motivations were collected in a number of ways. The research takes the method of questionnaire, interview and achievement tests. The questionnaire takes the method of Likert-scale. All the data collected from the questionnaire and tests were subjected to the statistic analysis tool SPSS (Statistic Package for the Social Sciences) 17.0. The questionnaires and achievement tests were analyzed by Paired-Samples T test and Independent-Samples T test. Which are used to check whether the ARCS motivational strategies are effective by comparing the scores of the questionnaire before and after the implication of ARCS Model. All the students were given a pre-questionnaire in order to investigate their performance in learning motivation; a post-questionnaire allowed comparison with the initial one and reflected the changes of students' action. And the results of the achievement performance of the two groups before and after the experiment were also analyzed by Paired-Samples T-test and Independent-Samples T-test, in order to see whether there is any difference on students'achievement performance before and after the experiment.After the questionnaire investigation, the participants were interviewed and asked a range of questions about the effectiveness of ARCS Model in promoting learning motivation. In addition, students were asked to hand up to show their likeness or dislike for certain activities used in class. Teachers can know the feedback from students in time, so they can have further adjustment of teaching strategies.The result shows that the students who had motivational classes had a higher level of motivation and performed better in English test than those who had traditional English classes. In spite of the limitation in the range of subjects and time span, this survey proves that ARCS Model does have positive effects both on the individuals' motivation in and out of English classes and on their language achievement tests in English learning.
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