On Motivation Of Adolescent Students' English Learning In Vocational And Technical Secondary Schools

Motivating students to think and learn is a prime problem of the classroom teachers. If there were no motivation, there would be no learning. In the history of education, many educators laid their eyes on this issue, and many theories and implication have made, such as reinforcement theory, need theory, attribution theory, and achievement theory, which explain motivation from different angles. In education, reinforcement theory emphasizes the function of reinforcer, which advises teachers that proper reinforcers can increase the motivation of learning, while Maslow's need theory tells us that"a person is not adequately energized to pursue some of the higher needs until the lower foundations of the pyramid have been satisfied (H. Douglas Brown 2001:36), as we know the most important need for students is love and self-esteem, so teacher should respect each student and create caring, respectful and trusting class atmosphere. Attribution theory advances that different students have different attribution for success and failure and for achievement theory, it proposes that teacher should help students to set reachable goal and let them taste the success of English learning.With the development of vocational and technical education, more and more students enter into such schools. Based on such techniques as questionnaire, classroom observation, and face-to-face interview, findings suggest that these students are much different from these in ordinary high schools in characteristic, language aptitude, cognitive style and the like. They belong to the low achieving or low performing students and most of them have failure experience in their junior middle schools, they seldom or never taste the pleasure of language learning and often are ignored by teachers, which result in their lower motivation in English learning. In the paper, the author agrees that there are many reasons for this, among which the teacher is one of the most important ones, in order to arouse their motivation on English learning, the paper suggests: a). knowing your students; b). build an equal, trusting, respectful class atmosphere; c). change your teaching method; and d).adopt portfolio to record the process of students'learning and to evaluate your students.