A Study On Correlation Between Vocational College Students’ English Learning Motivation And Their Oral Proficiency

As one of the important factors that affect foreign language learning, learning motivation has been paid much attention among the academic circles. It is quite common for the learning motivation studies to undergraduate students, but fewer studies take vocational college students as their research subjects. As a quickly expanding group, vocational college students own learning experiences and techniques unique to themselves. Morever, their English learning is only for the purpose of limited application in the daily life, which causes the low interest in English learning, and even the worse presentation in oral English. Thus this thesis will investigate the oral English learning in vocational college from the point of intrinsic motivation (IM) and extrinsic motivation (EM), explore the correlation between IM&EM and students’oral English proficiency; the present motivational situation in the vocational college; the improvement of students’oral English proficiency and learning motivation in EG by applying motivation incentive teaching method, aiming to supply certain teaching implications to the oral English teaching in vocational college.The experiment consists of the1st questionnaire, the pre-test, the motivation incentive teaching, the2nd questionnaire and the post-test. The questionnaire was designed in accordance with Vandergrift’s (2005) questionnaire. Cool Edi Pro2.0was applied to test the fluency and quantity in the pre-test and post-test. The experimental results are as follows:1. There is no significant correlation between intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and the vocational college students’oral English proficiency.2. The vocational college students’EM is stronger than IM; there is no significant motivational difference in students who are in various oral English proficiency.3. Both the English learning motivation and the oral English proficiency in EG are improved obviously after four months motivation incentive teaching training.Hence, IM and EM are the important but not the sole factor affecting the oral English proficiency. According to Cognitive Motivation Model (Williams and Burden,1997), the internal factors such as the attitude to language learning and the target language culture, and the external factors such as the parental and teacher factors, affect the L2learning frequently.Based on the study on IM and EM to vocational college students, the research shows that there is no direct relationship between students’ original motivation and their oral English proficiency. However, the motivational incentive teaching takes good effect on students’ oral English proficiency, which provides actual guiding significance to the oral English teaching in vocational colleges. The researcher suggests that considering the particularity of vocational college students, our oral English teachers ought to change the traditional teaching thinking, that is, improving students’oral English level from the point of motivation itself. The internal and external factors affecting the motivation should be explored. Based on this point, a more suitable teaching method might be found during the teaching process.