A Study On College Students' Motivation Depression In English Majors

Learning motivation is one of the most important non-intellectual elements which will influence English major undergraduates’ English learning. Sufficient learning motivation will exert a good effect on English learners with encouragement, guidance and enhancement.However, insufficient motivation or demotivation will lead to a bad learning result or even complete failure. At present, English majors are, in deed, faced with the problem of demotivation,and it really does harm to the effect of their English learning, the construction of efficient classroom, and the goal to cultivate their English professional talents with higher education. It is the important task for college English educators and English learners to find out methods to recover or reconstruct the English learning motivation. Thus, this study on demotivation, based on the previous studies on this subject at home and abroad and guided with the motivation theory,aims to correctly detecting the demotivation trend of English learning and helping effectively English majors reconstruct good English learning motivation.This study, adopting the methods of interview and questionnaire, has selected two hundred and forty English major students and five English teachers as the research objects from a local university of Shandong Province, aiming to deeply explore the characteristics and causes of English majors’ learning demotivation and seeks for the effective measures to reconstruct or recover their English learning motivation. The results from the questionnaire show that the phenomenon of English learning demotivation does exist pervasively among English majors.There are seven factors affecting the English major students’ learning demotivation: students’ self-confidence, English learning strategies, attitudes towards English culture, teachers, teaching environment, learning materials and peers. Among the seven factors, students’ confidence,English learning strategies, attitudes towards English culture belong to the internal factors;instead, teachers, teaching environment, learning materials and peers are attributed to the external factors. According to the results from this study, both English majors and teachers can make great joint effort to seek for methods to overcome the difficulty of English learning demotivation. On one hand, students should build up self-confidence, grasp effective learning strategies, treat the English culture in the right way and make correct attribution towards learning result; on the other hand, teachers ought to create comfortable class environment,comprehensively use all kinds of evaluation, carefully design learning tasks and emphasize the value to learn English.Of course, with the limit of time and condition, there are still some deficiencies in this study.For instance, the sample selected needs to be further broadened. This study has just analyzed thecharacteristics and elements of English major students’ learning demotivation from the perspectives of grade and gender. It needs deeply exploration within a wider range or new perspectives. Generally speaking, this study has achieved its expected goals, and its results are rather satisfying, having provided useful advice and guide for understanding the phenomenon of English majors’ learning demotivation, helping them recover and reconstruct learning motivation,enhancing the teaching quality and creating harmonious and effective English classroom.