A Correlative Study Of Rural Senior Middle School Students' English Learning Motivation And English Reading Abilities

In second language learning, a lot of emotional factors will influence students' learning effectiveness. No doubt, among those influential factors, motivation plays an essential role in second language learning. In recent years, Senior English New Curriculum Standard has pointed out the importance of foreign language(FL) learners' motivation in relation to learning outcomes. It is also widely accepted among language teachers that FL learning motivation plays an important role in students' language learning. So the study of how to help students' learning motivation take effect in the process of FL learning becomes more and more important.Based on the research done by some researchers both at home and abroad, the study has investigated the following points:a) which learning motivation is stronger for the rural students, integrative motivation or instructive motivation b) whether there are some differences between the female students and the male students in motivation and reading ability c) the relation between the rural students' motivation and reading ability, so that it can benefit English teaching in senior high. The participants are 222 senior two students in Binjiang Middle School Qingyuan Guangdong Province. In this study, a Motivation Questionnaire is administered to collect information on learners' individual information, learning motivation. The questionnaire is adapted from the version of Gao Liying (2009). To test the participants'English reading ability, the final exam of English is also included, which is the unified examination of the whole city of Qingyuan.The statistical analyses employed are descriptive statistics, T-Test, correlation analysis by SPSS 13.0. The findings are summarized as follows:first, rural students have stronger instrumental motivation than integrative motivation; second, female students not only have both stronger integrative motivation and instrumental motivation than male students, but also have higher reading ability than male students; third, there is a liner positive relationship between rural students' learning motivation and their reading ability.Based on the findings of the investigation, some implications are put forward: teachers can tell the students why they should study English to build up students' awareness of the value of the target language. That helps to stimulate and maintain students' motivation and to enhance the students' motivation. By studying students' response to the questionnaires and their sores in reading comprehension of the test, we found that rural students have less integrative motivation than instrumental motivation, teachers should encourage a balanced development to both integrative motivation and instrumental motivation especially for rural students. To stimulate the students' learning motivation, teacher should also try to make the classroom a harmonious, encouraging, caring and supportive place for students to learn. Besides, extra attention should be given to the development of discouraged students' self-confidence, which is another factor influencing students'learning motivation.