A Survey On The Effects Of Learning Motivations On Senior School Students’ English Writing

Learning motivation, an important factor influencing students’ studies, occupiesa dominant position in English learning. In the process of learning, students will beaffected by a variety of external and internal factors. Influences coming fromexternal factors form external motivations, including interest, sense of self-efficacy,goal, attribution, attitude and expected values, while influences from internalfactors, internal motivations, including significant others like teachers and parents,feedback, anxiety, tasks, resources and class structure. Students’ variousperformances in learning could be well explained by their learning motivations.Their learning motivations could exert various degrees of influence on their learningbehavior and learning achievement. So a close relationship exists between students’learning motivations and their learning scores. In this sense, the project of teachers’improving students’ learning situation and learning results from the perspective oflearning motivation is worthy of great attention and researches.The present study makes a survey on the influences of students’ Englishlearning motivations on their English writing scores based on the data obtainedthrough questionnaires and interviews of Senior One students in two classes at TheHigh School Attached to Hunan University. The survey result shows that students’internal motivations influence their English writing scores to a greater extent thantheir external ones. Among the internal motivations, interest is one of the primaryfactors influencing students’ learning, and it is positively related with Englishwriting scores. The sense of self-efficacy and goal are also significantly related withEnglish writing scores, and both of them are positively related with students’ scores.Moreover, attribution, attitude and expected values also influence students’ Englishwriting, and there is a positive correlation between them, while anxiety is negativelyrelated with students’ English writing scores. Among the external motivations,significant others like teachers and parents, and feedback have a positive effect onstudents’ English writing scores to a certain extent, whereas, tasks, resources andclass structure have fewer influences on students’ English writing scores. In the lightof the different roles played by various learning motivations in students’ Englishwriting scores, the author proposes some tactics accordingly. For example, arousingstudents’ interest in English writing，or bettering students’ self-efficacy, etc.