The Study Of Motivation And Learning Strategies Of Chinese Vocational EFL Freshmen

In recent years, the focus of foreign language teaching has been shifted from how toteach perfectly to how to learn successfully. With the development of research onpsycholinguistics and foreign language teaching and learning, applied linguists and languageteachers have increasingly had their eyes on the individual characteristics and differences oflearners.With respect to language learners, there are many factors influencing their languagelearning. These factors can be divided into internal ones and external ones. Internal factorscome from inside learners, such as personality, gender, age, intelligence, aptitude, firstlanguage, motivation, learning strategies, and so on. External factors come from outside of thelearners, including learning conditions, teaching quality, learning tasks, learning materials, etc.Both theoretical and empirical research has been conducted on these individual learnervariables, especially on language learning motivation and strategy, which have beenacknowledged as the two most influential on second language learning.With the rapid development of higher vocational education in China, the scale ofstudents in vocational colleges is getting larger and larger. In the aspect of personalityindividuality and psychology, obvious differences exist between students in vocationalcolleges and those in universities. Though English is one of the required courses for studentsin vocational colleges, many students lack interest in English learning and they get loweracademic achievements. Freshmen are in the process of getting used to the new environmentand teaching method. They are in need of teachers’appropriate direction. In order to have adeep and definite insight into the real conditions of freshmen’s English learning motivationand strategy, the author makes the related empirical study in the thesis based on the previousresearch results and hope to guide teaching, optimize teaching methods and facilitate learnersto study in an efficient way.The subjects are 115 non-English majors in the Rizhao Vocational College. Many factorsare involved in the study, such as gender, grade and students’origin. The research was carriedout in October, 2008 through a questionnaire survey and occasional interview during class. The questionnaire consists of 20 questions concerning students’learning motivations and 40questions concerning learning strategies. The author analyzes these data with the help ofSPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) software. The results reveal that: (1)freshmen hold medium intensity of motivation in English learning; (2) freshmen can adopt allsix learning strategies moderately; (3) There is a cyclical relationship between motivationintensity and strategy use frequency.According to the findings of this study, pedagogical implications have been discussed.Freshmen need appropriate direction to enforce their motivation and improve their strategyapplication. Of course，due to various limitations, the findings of the present study should beconsidered tentative and interpreted with caution. Further studies are needed to get a clearerpicture about this topic.