A Study Of The Learning Motivation Of The Students With English Learning Difficulties At Senior High Schools

In recent years, there has been a shift of direction and emphasis in education in China.The shift is from the test-oriented education to quality-oriented education. It emphasizes thateducation should face the world and the future, that is to say, education should develop fromthe nature of humans and society. But there are lots of students who fail in study in ourcountry. They are often called students with learning difficulties (LDs). Learning difficulty(LD) is universally seen in primary and secondary education, which results from a variety ofreasons. One of the main reasons is closely relevant to affective factors, since it is known thatlearning involves cognitive and affective process. Among all the affective factors, motivationis widely considered to be the main determining affective factors in developing a foreignlanguage.The New English Curriculum Standards in Senior High School issued by the Ministry ofEducation in2005stress that senior high school students should have definite learningmotivation as well as the awareness of learner autonomy, and further strengthen and sustaintheir learning motivation. Low achievers’ motivation to learn English is commonly quite poor,so the English teachers should try their best to improve the quality of teaching and foster thestudents’ learning motivation. Based on this consideration, an experiment was carried out toanalyze the reasons for the occurrence of low achievers in English and look for the scientificsolutions to this issue on the basis of motivation theory, and then to discuss how to transformthe low achievers in English in the teaching practice.The researcher puts forward theoretical frames from different perspectives so as to findwhich factors influence the students’ motivation, for instance, need theory, attribution theory,self-efficacy theory and goal theory. Of the different motivational theories, students’ goalorientation, self efficacy, attribution and so on are considered as the most important factors that influence students’ learning motivation in cognitive psychology. Therefore, teachersshould pay more attention to these motivational factors in order to improve the students’English learning motivation.In order to learn about learning motivational factors of senior high school students fully,the author did a teaching experiment in Grade2at No.1High School of Zhongmu in the formof a questionnaire. This questionnaire was carried out in two classes the author was teaching,each of which has60students respectively; one is served as experimental class, and the othercontrol class. The data are analyzed by SPSS19.0. The results of the questionnaire show thatthe majority of the students realize the importance of English learning, have explicit learningaims and attribute their former academic failures and successes correctly, but quite a few ofthem have low self efficacy, lack English learning interest and are dependent on teachers. Soimproving senior high school students’ learning interest and awareness of English, and at thesame time, helping them feel confident and be independent in English study are all goodcountermeasures of transforming the low achievers in senior high schools. Based on theresearch results from the questionnaire, the author has done another teaching experiment andthen has analyzed the scores of20low achievers from the experimental class and the controlclass respectively. During the experiment, some countermeasures were taken in theexperimental class to cultivate the low achievers’ interest and restore their confidence inEnglish study. In the end, the present author makes some suggestions on transforming Englishlow achievers in senior high schools. After half a year’s teaching experiment, thecountermeasures of transforming the English low achievers are proved practical and efficient,since most of the low achievers feel more confident, besides, they develop the interest inEnglish and try their best to learn English. It is hoped that the paper’s conclusions can get upto certain guiding significance for transforming low achievers in future research.