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A Study Of Relationships Among Motivation Orientations, Metacognitive Awareness And Proficiency In Chinese High School Students' EFL Listening

Posted on:2009-03-05Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:Y F XiangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2167360278469851Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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This is a replication of Canadian researcher Vandergrift's (2005) study in the Chinese context designed to investigate the relationships among motivation orientations, metacognitive awareness and proficiency in Chinese high school students' English as a foreign language (EFL) listening.A total of 58 high school students participated in this study. The questionnaires for assessing learners' motivational orientations and metacognitive learning strategies were translated and adopted from Vandergrift (2005) and his colleagues' (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, & Tafaghodtari, 2006) work. Back-translation was made to make sure that meanings of the original items were reserved. The listening comprehension section of a PETS 1 (Grade One Public English Test System) paper was used to measure the participants' English proficiency. Pearson Product-moment correlation analysis was used to compute the results.The results of motivational orientation scale indicated that the evidence for the existence of a self-determination continuum among motivation subscales could be found. As for the correlations between language motivational orientations and listening proficiency, the present study failed to find any significant relationship in them, which still needed further exploration. In addition, the results of learning strategy questionnaire demonstrated that the correlations between listening strategies and motivation orientations were not as strong as expected, but some evidence of the existence of the self-determination continuum could also be found somewhere. The more self-determined forms of motivation the students had, the more they reported using metacognitive listening strategies. A larger sample may have produced much more significant and stronger relationships.The present study has provided some evidence for the applicability of the self-determination theory to the motivational tendencies of learners in the Chinese context. The results also present an overall understanding of Chinese high school students' motivational orientations and metacognitive strategy use in EFL learning. Besides, this study also has made some steps forward in relating language learning motivation to actual language learning processes in an EFL context, and has provided a comparison to those results in Vandergrift's (2005) study. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
Keywords/Search Tags:EFL learning, self-determination theory, language learning motivation, language learning strategy
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