A Comparative Study Of Demotivation Between First-year And Third-year College Students

Motivation is one of the most important factors in foreign language learning. Agreat deal of research has been done both abroad and at home in this area. However,most research is focused on the positive side of motivation that can lead to successfullanguage learning, with little mentioning the negative side of motivation, namely,demotivation. In effect, demotivation is a common phenomenon in foreign languagelearning context. Studying demotivation allows us to recognize factors that affectstudents’foreign language learning from a new perspective. Finding out the causes ofdemotivation is helpful for us to take targeted measures to maintain or even enhancestudents’motivation.The present study is an investigation of non-English majors’English learningdemotivation.The aim of this study is to examine the serious situation of Englishlearning demotivation in non-English majors, to explore the main causes ofdemotivation. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed togain an insight into non-English majors’ English learning demotivation. First,220participants from Shanxi College of Traditional Chinese Medicine were asked tocomplete a questionnaire on demotivation. Then, responses to the questionnaire wereput into computer and analyzed by SPSS20.0.After the analysis of the data obtainedfrom the questionnaire, conclusions are reached as follows:1) Non-English majors’ English learning demotivation is rather common andserious in universities.2) Four primary demotivating factors are identified: teacher-related factors，student-related factors，course-related factors， learning environment-related factors3) when comparing the demotivation between the fist-yesr and third-yearstuidents, the study finds that difference between two grades reach significantlevel statistically; the high-proficiency student’s demotivation of two grades isdifferent significantly; the difference of the low-proficiency students and themiddle-proficiency students of two grades is not significant. Based on the results of the present study, some pedagogical implications are putforward in the hope to protect students’English learning motivation and prevent theirEnglish learning demotivation.