A Study On Three-year Medical Students’ English Learning Motivation

More and more people have recognized that motivation plays an important role in foreignlanguage learning. Motivation, as a non-intellectual factor, is increasingly attracting the attention ofscholars and classroom teachers. The focus of foreign language teaching has been transferred fromteachers’teaching to students’learning.With regard to the investigation of foreign language learning motivation, scholars at home andabroad have made extensive research. But most previous studies have focused on the importance ofmotivation for language learning and the classification of motivation types and so on. Little researchhas been designed to investigate motivation changes of the same learners in different periods and themotivation differences with students in different majors and between the students with high score andlow score in case studies.In addition, the three-year medical students have their unique characteristics in many ways. Mostof them come from the rural areas, where English teaching level is relatively low. Their low Englishscore in college entrance examination and the heavy medical curriculums result in students’lowenthusiasm for English learning and inactive classroom atmosphere, and some students lack initiativein learning English.Based on foreign learning motivation theory, this thesis is to solve the following questionsthrough the study on students’English learning motivation in Fenyang College of Shanxi MedicalUniversity: 1) Are there motivation changes of three-year medical students at the beginning of thefirst year and the second year? 2) Are there any motivation differences between nursing students andclinical medicine students? 3) Are there any motivation differences between high score group and lowscore group? Through analysis of the survey results, the researcher put forward correspondingmeasures to inspire the three-year medical students’English learning motivation.The researcher conducted questionnaire on English learning motivation for 142 students (42 boysand 100 girls) from nursing and clinical medicine departments in Fenyang College of Shanxi MedicalUniversity, and analyzed the data using the statistical package SPSS version 19.0. The followingconclusions are drawn from the analysis: firstly, though most students are with poor English, they canstill realize the importance of English learning and they have both intrinsic motivation and extrinsicmotivation at the beginning of the first year. After one-year English learning, intrinsic motivation of the students becomes weak but extrinsic motivation is enhanced; secondly, students majoring innursing have different English learning motivation from those majoring in clinical medicine: intrinsicmotivation of the former group is much stronger than that of the latter group; thirdly, the students withhigh score have stronger intrinsic motivation than those with low score, while the latter has strongerextrinsic motivation than the former. It indicates that intrinsic motivation can better promote learners’interest in English learning than extrinsic motivation. Besides, the researcher interviewed 15three-year medical students (8 students majoring in nursing and 7 students majoring in clinicalmedicine) and came to the following conclusion: motivation changes of both surveys are related to theuneven English level of students, teachers’teaching model and comprehensive quality and collegeexamination evaluation and so on. Moreover, the students’motivation differences between the nursingmajor and the clinical medicine major are due to the fact that nursing students have higher Englishlevel and attach greater importance to the nursing English.According to foreign language learning motivation theory, in combination with the surveyanalysis and the researcher’s ten-year teaching experience, the researcher puts forward somesuggestions to improve students’English learning motivation, such as establishing a good relationshipbetween teachers and students, reforming classroom teaching mode under the guidance of the multipleintelligences theory, combining summative evaluation with formative evaluation, implementinglevel-based English teaching. These teaching strategies can stimulate learners’intrinsic motivationand extrinsic motivation to promote the English language proficiency of three-year medical studentsto a higher level. Finally, the researcher pointed out some limitations of the investigation and somegaps that remain to be filled.