A Study Of The Relationship Between Learning Motivation Type And Vocational School Students’ Spoken English Competence

It is universally believed that motivation and attitude are the two importantfactors influencing foreign language learning. Corder(1973) also holds that: withmotivation, anyone can learn a language. This paper expatiates the spoken Englishdevelopment and the related study of learning motivation and English learning both athome and abroad, and finds that most studies are about college English majorstudents‘learning motivation and spoken English, while studies about Junior schoolstudents and secondary vocational students are weak. In spoken English test, a largenumber of studies take the large-scale standardized test as the research object, and fewsuch researches are done from the perspective of the learning subject–students toanalyze their motivation in participating in a test, their psychological factors in a testprocess, and their personality factors that affect their performance in a test. Also, feware done from the point of view of the students to look at how they think in theirspoken output process and their influencing factors.This study attempts to take spoken English learning motivation types as factorsthat influence the students‘spoken English and intends to investigate the followingquestions with the instrument of questionnaire and verbal reports.1) Is there a correlation between vocational students‘respective motivation typeand their spoken English ability?2) What is the characteristic of vocational students‘spoken English withdifferent motivation types?This study was carried out among1225students from different majors in HeyuanVocational and Technical school where the author works and another vocationalschool called Heyuan Technology School. The subjects were chosen from grade threewho have taken the PETS-2spoken Test and whose learning motivation for spokenEnglish learning has been relatively stable. A learning motivation questionnaire isused to survey the students’ learning motivation types. At the same time, the student‘PETS-2spoken English scores are used as a reference. Finally, the author chose12students with different learning motivation types, asked them to do an English verbalreport, and video recorded the whole process for analysis. Through the Pearson correlation analysis of the questionnaire results ansstudents‘spoken English score obtained from spss14.0, the results are shown asfollows:1) The result of Pearson correlation analysis shows that both instrumentalmotivation and integrative motivation correlates positively with students‘spokenEnglish at a significant level. But integrative motivation correlates vocationalstudents‘spoken English positively(r=.649(**)) at the more significant level than theinstrumental motivation does(r=.453(**)).2) The analysis of the two motivation type students‘spoken English shows thatinstrumental students value grammar correction more and resort to self-correctionmore often, therefore, they produce more repetition and acquire lower fluency. Also,their reports are more associated with things about themselves. Integrative studentsvalue fluency and consistency more. Although they made more grammatical mistakes,they adopt less self-correction. Therefore, they are more fluent and quick inexpressing their ideas. Also, they use more remedy words, discourse markers, moresimple sentences and more idioms. What‘more, integrative motivational students tendto apply the pitch change of the intonation and adopt more body language includingeye contact and gestures to reveal their emotions. Finally, their speeches are moreconcerned about western cultures which shows that they are more eager to integrateinto the western culture.Based on the above findings, the author argues that both motivation types are ofgreat importance to students‘spoken English competence, thus, different suggestionsaccording to students‘different learning motivation type in oral English teachingshould be adopted. And since integrative motivation severs better to students‘spokenEnglish competence, the author further puts forward how to transfer the students’instrumental motivation types to integrative motivation type. In the end, the authorpoints out the shortcomings of this study and presents suggestions for the future study.