A Study Of Business English Major’s Learning Motivation And Motivational Strategies

Motivation has always been considered as one of the most important individualfactors which can affect second/foreign language achievement. In recent years, therehave been many researches at home and abroad concerning the construct, model,framework, influencing factors and strategies of second/foreign language learningmotivation. However, few were conducted in the context of Business English.Business English (BE) as an important branch of English for Specific Purposes (ESP),is based on the context of business environment, and emphasizes the development ofstudents’ English communication abilities and skills in international businessenvironment. As a result, some relevant research findings and results about generalEnglish learning motivation may not be very appropriate for BE learning.Therefore, the present study was conducted to find the main motivational typeof BE majors, the correlations among motivation, class anxiety, and motivationalintensity, and the main motivation-affecting factors, so as to propose somemotivational strategies in BE context. The instrument of the present study isquestionnaire, which is mainly based on Gardner’s AMTB(Attitude/Motivation TestBattery). The raw data were collected from74BE majors of grade three from businessschool of Xi’an International studies Univerisity and analyzed by SPSS16.0. Theresults indicate that instrumental motivation is the dominant motivational type of BEmajors; integrative motivation is negatively correlated with class anxiety andpositively correlated with motivational intensity; instrumental motivation has apositive correlation with class anxiety and a negative correlation with motivationalintensity; the main motivation-affecting factors are personal characteristics or interest,teaching methods or styles, etc.. In addition, the motivational strategies proposed bythe researcher are students’ involvement in setting specific learning goals, the buildingof students’ learning autonomy and self-confidence, timely and effective feedback, theinvolvement of authentic materials, and flexible teaching methods and class activities.