An Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Family Cultural Factors And EFL Learners' Motivation

Motivation is one of the most dynamic factors of EFL learner's learning, is the main reason for students to carry on and maintain their studying activities. As was mentioned by Rod Ellis that the level and type of motivation is strongly influenced by the social context in which learning takes place.( Rod Ellis, 2000: 119) Family environment is one of the most important components of social context, so this investigation aims at probing into the characteristics of family culture and finding out the correlativity between EFL learners' motivation and the following four family cultural factors: parents' basic conditions, family cultural resources, parents' cultural interactions with their children and children's cultural activities.Except for the parts of introduction and conclusion, this thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One discusses general theories about EFL learner's motivation and its orientations; Chapter two is a brief discussion of the causes of the lack of intrinsic motivation of Chinese EFL learners; Chapter three introduces some basic concepts of family culture; Chapter four shows presentations of contents, purposes, methods and results of this investigation. On these bases, the author gives suggestions for how to establish a new family culture, which is to do good to EFL learners' formation of intrinsic motivation.Survey research and correlational research are used, and 168 day students in senior Grade Three of key urban middle schools and their parents were investigated in this investigation. Through the investigation and analysis of the empirical data, we got a result similar to Gardner and Lambert's finding: EFL learners' intrinsic motivation is more effective in facilitating successful EFL learning than extrinsic motivation. Based on this knowledge, parents' educational orientation of humanistic value,...