A Study On Salient Demotivating Factors Affecting English Learning At Senior High School

Learning motivation is of vital importance to English learning, which determines how actively learners would behave during the learning process. However, students’learning motivations are not always invariable, because it may be weakened to some degree by some factors which students themselves can not control, that is so called demotivation. This study was undertaken, by means of closed-questionnaire and interview, to find out the salient demotivating factors affecting English learning in senior high school in terms of grades. Nowadays more and more negative attitudes towards study are identified among high school students facing the great pressure of college entrance examination, especially their disinterest in English, which is a key subject. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct this research on demotivation. The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1. What are the demotivating factors affecting senior high school students’English learning?2. What are the salient demotivating factors respectively affecting each grade students’ English learning?In this paper, for the comprehensive and exhaustive data, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were exploited, one is close-ended questionnaire and the other is open interview. The validity and reliability have been tested by Wang (2011) in MA thesis. The subjects chosen for completing the questionnaires were174students of three grades from Yizheng High School, Jiangsu Province. Data were collected by the author herself during evening class and data analysis involved statistical description in terms of percentage and means by SPSS17.0to do a contrastive analysis from general tendency and age. Another research instrument is open interview. The subjects involved were six students from different grades in this high school who labeled themselves as demotivated learners. Each face to face talk lasted for10minutes, and the author recorded the information before transcribing it, as supplement for the cause of demotivation.The major findings yielded from the study are summarized as follows:Firstly, by descriptive statistics,51.72%of the high school students are confronted with demotivation-related problems and cannot overcome on their own, and there appears a gradually ascending trend in different learning period (from Grade1to Grade3). Besides, there are six categories of demotivating factors affecting the high school students mostly, which are, from high to low, parental influence, attitudes towards English, course book-related factors, school environment, learner-related factors, and compulsory nature of English learning. This finding is almost in line with Wang’s findings in her MA thesis (2011) except one category of factors--course-related factors. This difference may result from the different editions of textbooks and school-based course.Secondly, the category and degree of demotivating factors affecting each grade students in high school present different situation. For the Grade1students, negative attitudes towards English, course book-related factors and self-related factors rank the highest (from high to low). For the Grade2students, negative attitudes towards English, self-related factors and course book-related factors are the three salient ones hindering learners from learning, which is almost the same as Grade1situation except that the sequence is different. For the Grade3students, such external factors as negative influence from parents or friends, school environment and negative attitudes towards English, rank the highest.The results above are significant to learn the cause of demotivation of senior high students’English learning and remotivate and keep student’s motivation from different levels. First, for Grade1and Grade2with the same demotivation factors, teachers should flexibly take advantage of memorization regularity like Ebbinhaus Curve, give positive feedback, and explore emotion factors in course content as well as helping students foster proper learning motivation, attributive model and learning strategies. For Grade3, at school, friendly and relaxed learning environment should be constructed; at home, harmonious family atmosphere should be formed and parents should use reasonable ideal to influence their children. Also, a multicooperation system between family and school may be formed so as to improve students’motivation.