Motivation Theories And Their Guidance In ELT In Secondary Schools

Since the 1970s, the focus of the foreign language teaching has moved, from "teacher-centered" to "student-centered". Many applied linguists and language teachers have begun to explore how learner's factors like personality, learning strategies, cognitive styles, motivations affect the foreign language learning. Motivations, as one of the most important learner's factors has received much attention. Many researches have been made on it according to different research goals, and some theories have been formulated such as need motivation, achievement motivation, attribution motivation, self-efficiency motivation etc. Need motivation basis on the human basic need, has largely provided the guidance on the foreign language learning. While studying the foreign language, students need to have their basic needs satisfied. Only when their basic needs have been satisfied, may they just go to pursue higher needs. In addition, teachers must fix attention on the students' emotional need in the course of teaching, for emotional need is an important one of the variable factors of the learning motivation. Achievement motivation as one of relatively advanced social motivations has still been studying by psychologists and linguists. Generally speaking, learners with high achievement motivation often regard the expectation of consequence of learning behavior as motives, and the result succeeding evokes their higher achievement motivation again. However, learners with low achievement motivation is opposite, they regard the result of learning as a kind of threats to their own self-respect and they are afraid of the consequence of learning whether it will succeed or not. So there are close relations between the grade obtained and achievement motivation. Attributionmotivation theory has developed on the basis of achievement motivation. It emphasizes the analysis of attribution on the consequence of learning behavior and probes into students' attribution of success or failure, infers students' motivation to the following behavior accordingly. On the foundation of these motivation theories, some linguists like Gardner and Lambert probed the motivation theory on the foreign language learning. They indicate that the motivation should have been divided into two parts, one is integrative motivation, that is, the purpose of learning another language is not only to learn language, but to accept the culture and life style of the language, and to become members of this language corporation. The other is instrumental motivation, namely, learners learn another language for a certain practical purpose. These theories provide some guidance in English language teaching and English language teaching has improved accordingly.This thesis principally examines the foreign language learning situations in the high school and conducts an investigation of learner's motivations in a middle school. Through the data and data analysis, it goes to examine the relationship between motivation and learning achievement, and it also analyzes some variables related to learner's internal and external motivation. At the end of the thesis, some suggestions stimulating learner's motivations are put forward.