An Investigation Of English Learning Motivation Of Tibetan College Students

The purpose of the paper, an empirical study, is to explore the main types of motivation and the relationship between types of motivation and motivational intensity and the differences caused by gender. The paper provides English education of Tibetan college students with some suggestions. Based on the former investigation, the paper collects its statistics by way of questionnaires.208students who participate in the test come from Northwest University for Nationalities (NWUN).They accomplish the questionnaires which contain three parts-personal information, types of motivation and motivational intensity. The paper gains its statistics by SPSS16.0and analysizes the statistics as follows:1) Factor analysis, to analysize the types of learners’ motivation;2) correlational analysis, to explore the relationship between the motivation types and motivational intensity;3) Independent samples test, to dig into the disparity of motivations between girls and boys. There are three findings in the paper:1) There are three types of motivation in Tibetan college students’ English learning:cultural, instrumental and situational, as well as seven sub-types of motivation which contain individual development, learning situation, intrinsic interest, social responsibility, going abroad, immediate achievement and national consciousness.2) The seven types of motivation have relevance with efforts paid by students, of which the relationship between immediate achievement and efforts is a negative one, and the relationship between achievement and others is positive. Besides, the relevance between efforts and inner interest is more relative than that of others and motivational intensity.3) There are obvious differences between girls and boys in learning situation, intrinsic interest, social responsibility and going abroad. However, they share some common parts in individual development, immediate achievement and national consciousness. From the aspect of motivational intensity, there is no remarkable difference between girls and boys.Depended on the research, the paper puts out some advice about how to stimulate and to keep the Tibetan college students’ learning motivation, such as how to encourage students keeping their interest in learning, how to cultivate special learning ways for Tibetan students and etc., in order to improve the efficiency of English teaching on the side of Tibetan college students.