A Survey Of Senior High School Students' Learning Motivation

For many years educators and researchers have been worked on looking for efficient teaching methods, but they are not satisfied.In recent years with the advances in general linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, the focus of research in second language acquisition (SLA) has shifted from teaching to learning. That is to say, language learners become the center of language teaching and learning. In the teaching practice many teachers complain about students' lack of motivation, lack of enthusiasm for learning. As to learners, many factors affect their language learning such as gender, individual background, motivation, age and attitude in foreign language learning. And motivation has been considered a key factor to successful language learning. Among them, language learning motivation is a main research topic .And it is considered a key factor to successful language learning, a lot of studies have been carried out on them.Therefore, the author, based on the previous research done by some researchers both at home and abroad, makes the study to investigate the Chinese senior high school students' learning motivation so that it can benefit English teaching.The present study aims to investigate Chinese senior high school students' motivation intensity, and to distinguish the motivational differences between urban and rural students, high-achievers and low-achievers and between male learners and female learners. Then correlation analysis is adopted to analyze the relationship between the learners' motivation and performance. The participants are 143 senior high school students in Dalian.In this study, an English Learning Questionnaire is administered to collect information on learners' individual background, learning motivation and learning strategies. The questionnaire is designed according to the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery or AM'TB (Gardner 1985: 177-84) and Gao Yihong's (2003) Motivation Type Scale, but some items had been changed to be appropriate to the particular situation under research; and several other items were added on the basis of questionnaires used in several previous studies The statistical analysis employed are descriptive statistics, T-Test, correlation analysis by SPSS. The findings are summarized as follows:1. Female learners have stronger parental encouragement and more intense integrative orientation than male learners in English language learning; 2.there is no significant difference in motivation between urban and rural learners. High-achievers have stronger motivation than low-achievers in English learning in every aspect. Their instrumental motivation is the strongest. 4. The differences between high-achievers' motivation and low-achievers motivation suggest that motivation correlates with English proficiency.In the light of the study, the thesis also provides some suggestions for enhancing students' motivation, such as creating good learning environments, taking effective measures to foster students' integrative motivation, taking effective measures to enhance students' intrinsic motivation.