Cultivation Of Senior High School Students' English Learning Drive

The New Senior English Curriculum Criteria for China advocates that teaching should open to all students and lay the foundation for students'lifelong development; concern students emotion; create a free, democratic and harmonious learning atmosphere; give enough guidance to students'learning strategies and help them form self-learning capabilities. Obviously, students are the center of classroom teaching, which demands of teachers to arouse students'learning drive so that students themselves can produce the inner power to learn.The present research is an empirical study of the application of drive theory and its related theories to explore a new English teaching framework for senior high school to cultivate students'English learning drive.This thesis is composed of five parts.In the introduction, the research rationales, aims and the organization of the thesis are presented.Chapter one presents a literature review of the research of drive abroad and home.Chapter two is the theoretical basis of the research, including the basis of drive, need theory, feedback theory, goal setting and meaningful learning.Chapter three is a research design in which the subjects, participants, instruments, pre-test, data collection and findings are carried out.The empirical study of cultivating students'English learning drive is in the chapter four. A framework to cultivate students'learning drive is come up with based on the relevant study and the findings in chapter three. During the research, two-semester-long empirical experiment was conducted at Experimental High School of Hebei Normal University from June 2006 to June 2007. All the subjects are students of senior two. There are 54 and 52 students in control class and experimental class respectively. They are homogeneous and parallel groups in terms of proportion of gender, English achievement and learning drive. Drive-based English teaching was put into practice while traditional English classroom teaching is given to the control class. The post-test on English proficiency and the post-questionnaire were employed in both classes. The results of independent and paired-samples T-test(p<0.05)respectively revealed that after two semesters'English classroom teaching,the experimental class students'English significantly exceeded that of the control class as well as the learning drive level. However, the control class did not make much progress.Then a discussion is made based on the statistical data derived from the experiment and the data collected from questionnaires. Finally a conclusion is drawn:drive-based oral English classroom teaching can cultivate senior high school students'learning drive in English and is supportive for language ability.A brief conclusion is drawn at the end of the thesis, the significance of the research, limitation and suggestions for further study included.