Effects Of Motivation On High School Students' English Learning

This thesis results from observation, interview, consulting documents,investigation,special case study,experience summary, etc. It consists of six parts. The first part comes as an introduction. In this part the writer mainly states the significance of motivation study to high school English teaching. The second part is about the essentials of motivation. Motivation is the driving power, the intrinsic cause which encourages people to take action to achieve their goals and a psychological mood in which individuals start and keep their behavior. Motivation is the major factor of learning process. The motivation of a person decides the quality, level, and effect of his activities. Learning motivation is one of the motivations of human beings' behavior and a strong desire for knowledge .It is an intrinsic cause of promoting English learning, and it is an active psychological state when a learner is learning a foreign language. There are different types of motivation, such as: integrative motivation and instrumental motivation, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, indirect long-range motivation and direct short- range motivation, achievement motivation, deep motive and surface motive. Motivation has the following functions: Stimulating function-------- stimulating one's enthusiasm for learning;2. Choice and instructional function-------- deciding what to do and encouraging one to study hard; Maintaining and regulating function-------- maintaining one's enthusiasm and energy in his study so as to reach one's goal.In the third part of the thesis, the writer reviews the precious relevant studies on motivation both at home and abroad. Part four deals with the data analysis of the survey with the purpose to find out the factors which affect high school students' English learning. According to the results of investigation, the writer found that there are two main types of factors affecting high school students' English learning: internal factors and external factors. Internal factors mainly refer to attitude, self-esteem, learning pressure, strategies, attention, cross-culture consciousness, etc. External factors refer to English teachers' quality, English teachers' teaching methods, English teachers' expectation, the difficulty of tasks, the design of teaching material, parents' education, the atmosphere of English learning in and out of classes, the ways of evaluation,etc. Among the factors,teacher is one of the most important factors which affect high school students' motivation of English Learning. In the fifth part, the thesis mainly discusses how to stimulate students' motivation of English learning. It is the main body of the thesis. According to the results of investigation, if we want to stimulate students' motivation of English learning, we must create advantageous learning conditions and meet students' psychological needs by means of English teaching in class. We can take measures as follows: enhancing English teachers' quality,bringing teachers' leading role into full play, building up positive teachers' expectation and equal relationship between teachers and students, attaching importance to students' needs and utilizing them, controlling anxiety, creating relaxed learning environment, training students' English learning strategies, timely feedback, building up scientific systems of evaluation, and using teaching material rationally. The sixth part is a conclusion, and it is the summary of the thesis.Starting from the definition, functions, significance and types of motivation, the writer investigates and analyses the factors which affect high school students' motivation of English learning. The thesis mainly focuses on the ways of stimulating high school students' motivation of English learning according to their psychological characteristics. The writer hopes that this thesis will be of a little help to tapping the students' potentialities and the quality-oriented education being carried out throughout the country.