A Study On The Effect Of Enhancing Learning Motivation On Senior Middle School Students' English Learning

In 2004, the author gave out a questionnaire to the students in Senior Three, all of whom were taught by the author herself. It was about English learning motivation. The research showed that those who got high marks in NMET had stronger learning motivation, especially integrative motivation. As a result, the author wanted to do the research, trying to find out the effect of enhancing students' learning motivation on students' English learning.This study is a report on English learning motivation of senior middle school students. It was conducted in two normal classes with 100 students in Tianjin NO. 4 Middle School. One class with 50 students was randomly chosen as the experiment class while the other with 50 students as the control class. In order to find out whether enhancing the students' learning motivation by means of teaching can improve students' English achievement, a great number of cooperative learning and autonomous learning activities were carried out in the experiment class. But in the control class the form of classroom teaching was still teacher-centered. The experiment lasted a whole year. The result showed the students in the experiment class outperformed those in the control one. In the post-test for the two classes a t-value is 2.196>1.96, reaching the level of significance. The same questionnaire was distributed to the students for the second time after the post-test and the t-value is 2.46>1.96, also reaching significance. In the course of interviews, 80 percent of the interviewees from the experiment class considered it was the student-centered teaching, the autonomous learning and the activities that motivated their great interest in English learning.Because of its limited scope of the subjects and time, this study needs to be further explored and experimented.