Stimulate Learning Motivation In Learning Contexts

The writing of the paper mainly focuses on stimulating Junior Three students' motivation in the learning contexts in Beixiaoying Middle School, Shunyi District, Beijing, China by an action research. Because of a great change in the current curriculum, in which students learning interests, attitudes, and feelings have become increasingly assessable to the classroom foreign language teaching and learning, it calls for more theory-oriented and up-dated instructional techniques for teachers to stimulate the students' motivation to learn and to help students learn efficiently. And furthermore it calls for the teachers to lay emphasis on students direct experiences.The main body of the paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter aims at providing a clear introduction to the background of the action research and the thesis outline which is based on the development of the paper. The second chapter intends to lend theoretical supports and the experimental rationale to stimulate the students' motivation in the learning contexts and render an insightful view on it by reviewing the influential theoretical achievement in relevant domain of psychological research, pedagogical research and Second Language Acquisition study. The theories center around the study about the motivation in the learning contexts and how to stimulate students' motivation raised by Brophy, Ausubel, Gurtner and Volet. The third chapter discusses the implementation of the action research and a discussion about the action research result. First it presents the two action research problems: (1) the students have no or little motivation in English learning, because the activities in class are boring and not lively and what they have learned has nothing to do with their real life; (2) the teacher follows the traditional, teacher-centered way of teaching. Secondly it describes the 19-week action plan and the work that has been done for developing activities which are designed to be based on results of the action research project, following the principles of stimulating students' motivation in the learning contexts. The writer discusses the results and analysis weekly according to the nineteen weeks action plan. In the last chapter the writer gives a conclusion about the action research that students' motivation in the learning contexts can be greatly stimulated with the real-life activities. But due to the limited time, the students achievements are not satisfactory, that is their scores can not be increased enough. And the questionnaire, the interview, the topic of the students' written essays, and the six real-life materials are to be found in the appendix.