A Research On The English Reading Motivation Of Yi Senior Middle School Students

With the development of the internationalization English plays more and more important role in worldwide communication. Reading is the most important and basic skill of English learning for Chinese students to master. Motivation is considered to be one of the main determining factors of English reading in developing a L2or a foreign language (FL). In this sense, it is very necessary and important to investigate the ethnic students’English reading motivation especially in the places where minority ethnic groups live. So the thesis conducts a research in the case of Yi Senior Middle School in Liangshan prefecture.The purpose of this study is meant to answer what types of motivation Yi Senior Middle School Students typically have and what different preferences of variables in English reading learning motivations among students of high and low English achievement are.The subjects in this study are113students of Grade one in Yi Senior Middle School of Liangshan prefecture. The study collects two different data of the same subjects, one is the English reading learning motivation questionaries of Yi Senior Middle School of Liangshan prefecture and the other one is the scores achieved by students of Yi Senior Middle School of Liangshan prefecture in the reading comprehension of College Entrance Examination.The data is input into the computer and analyzed by SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science). The analysis procedures are as follows:1) Factor analysis and descriptive statistics including means and standard deviations are adopted to show the main types of English reading2) Independent samples T-test are used to compare the differences between high-and-low-score groups as for motivational type and English achievement.Through the study, the thesis has the following findings:1) Based on the results of the motivation questionaries, the students of Yi Ethnic Senior Middle School typically have eight main motivations, which are reading for developing, reading for grade requirement, intrinsic interest in reading, levels of English reading ability, international factors, English reading medium, listening, speaking and reading in English, challenges in English reading.2) By comparing high achievers group and low achievers group in the English reading of College Entrance Examination, the thesis finds that the3top different preferences of variables in English reading learning motivations among students of high and low English achievement are the motivations of reading for development, intrinsic interest in English reading, and international factors.Finally, some suggestions are given to the learners and teachers of ethnic middle schools. Firstly, ethnic students should hold the three top motivations (reading for development, intrinsic interest in English reading and levels of English reading ability), which can promote their English reading achievement. Secondly, teachers should pay more attention to the similarities between ethnic students’ Chinese reading learning and English reading learning, point out the obstacles and the differences in their learning. They can give right orientation to the ethnic students and let them set up the future plan. Everything they read should be made as interesting as possible to form a good habit of reading English in their daily life. Various reading materials of different levels must be chosen to encourage and help students to build confidence and promote their English reading proficiency.