An Investigation And Study On Senior One Students' Motivation In English Learning

In recent years, an increasing number of foreign language teachers and researchers have focused their attention on learners' individual differences and carried out substantial studies on affective factors from various perspectives. The affective components contribute much to the language learning. Attention to affective aspects can lead to more effective language learning, especially motivation. Paying much more attention to the motivation can improve learning efficiency and qualitativeness. Researches at home and abroad show that the learner's motivation has a certain bearing on his English learning achievement (ELA), and, in some cases, even determine it success or failure.This paper cites a lot of studies about motivation and learning from the perspective of humanistic teaching notion. The author gives many definitions from different aspects, lists different types of motivation according to the definitions, collects related motivation theories and mentions motivation in English learning. The aim is to let the paper have a strong theory basis. Because of the characteristics of the author's students, according to the scores of an English test, the names were listed from the top to the bottom. Then based on the overall mean score, students were divided into two groups named high score group and low score group. Then an investigation about students' motivation in English learning was carried out. And another comparison between students of high English level and low English level was investigated. The content mainly refers to two aspects of motivation in literature review: integrative motivation and instrumental motivation. It aims at finding out which motivations are stronger in students' learning. Then in the future process of teaching, teaching methods will be improved to arouse students' motivation in order that students can get great achievement. According to the results of the investigation, both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation have an influence on students' learning to different extent. Also there is a clear difference in motivation between students of high English level and low English level. In fact, extrinsic motivation (instrumental motivation) plays greater role in students' learning than intrinsic motivation (integrative motivation). However, only when students have the intrinsic motivation (integrative motivation), can they have a sustaining interest in learning English.Therefore, according to the results of the investigation and the author's personal practice, in the last part of the study the author presented some methods and suggestions which can arouse students' motivation so that our teachers can be instructed in the future teaching.