Application Of ARCS Model Of Motivation To Spoken English For Foreign Trade Teaching In Vocational Colleges

In order to cultivate talents with application-oriented technology, Spoken Englishfor Foreign Trade, as a professional course, is absolutely important for BusinessEnglish majors. However, there are many problems during the process of learning thiscourse. Hence, it is necessary to stimulate and maintain learning motivation ofstudents to improve their learning effect, and train their autonomous learning ability.Professor Keller’s ARCS Model of Motivation has analyzed all kinds ofmotivation theories, and designed its strategies with a problem solving approach.Moreover, it has a good effect on stimulating and maintaining motivation. With allkinds of teaching and learning strategies, for example, network teaching resources,project teaching and cooperative learning, etc., applied study of this theoretical modelon Spoken English for Foreign Trade in Vocational Colleges has been made in thisthesis.There are four parts in this paper: introduction, related theories and review,teaching experiment and conclusion.Through interviewing students and presenting the general learning situation ofSpoken English for Foreign Trade, the introduction part first discusses the researchbackground. Then, it puts forward the purpose and significance, methods and theoverall framework of the thesis.The second part mainly introduces motivation and its related theories and modelsof motivation design. It puts emphasis on ARCS Model of Motivation and its researchfindings in both theory and practice. In addition, it also explores the effectiveness ofteaching and learning theory to support effective teaching.The part of teaching experiment mainly consists of the following four stages:analysis of teaching and learning situation, design and selection of motivationstrategies, application of strategies and assessment. During the process of analyzingteaching and learning situation, motivation status, demand and research on motivationlevel (through questionnaire) have been made. The design and selection of strategies are centered on the four elements of ARCS theory (attention, relevance, confidenceand satisfaction) according to what have been learnt in the previous stage. Theapplication of strategies includes the integration of teaching resources, the applicationof teaching and proposal of formative evaluation. In the application of teaching,cooperative learning, project teaching and simulation of company training, andnetwork teaching resources are elaborated with teaching cases and pictures. In theassessment stage, the feasibility and validity of the application effect of ARCS Modelon Spoken English for Foreign Trade have been validated through experimental datain students’ motivation level and performance.The last part is the conclusion of the thesis and the following conclusions aredrawn:1. All the following strategies such as the analysis of demand, cooperativelearning, project teaching, simulation of company training and network teachingresources can help stimulate and maintain students’ motivation in learning SpokenEnglish for Foreign Trade.2. Motivation strategies of ARCS Model can effectively stimulate the motivationfrom all the following four fields: attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction.What’s more, in terms of creativity of the thesis, firstly, the thesis holds thatstudents’ emotional factors should be taken into consideration; secondly, thecombination of network teaching resources and simulation of company training, etc.in classroom instructional design, should be employed.Finally, based on the limitations of present study this paper offers somesuggestions for further study.