An Investigation Into Student’s English Learning Motivation In Vocational Colleges In Bao Tou City

Motivation as one of the individual factors plays a key role in SLA.Motivation is a very important factor which influences the outcome of students second language acquisition. Jakobovits (1970) pointed out: in several majorfactors that affect learners in language learning, the proportion of motivationaccounted for33%, intelligence accounted for33%, ability accounted for20%and other factors accounted for14%. It shows the importance of learningmotivation. As a language teacher, it is necessary to understand students motivation and to adopt effective strategies to improve motivation. As Oxford(1994) said:“if a teacher doesn t know the root cause of student motivation, letalone how to water them,” Therefore, as foreign language teachers, they havethe responsibility and obligation to understand and mobilize students Englishlearning motivation. Since the late1950s, motivation has been studied by manyresearchers and educators. Gardner and Lambert studied motivation from socialpsychological perspective, and put forward the socio-educational model. Someresearchers proposed the extended framework of the motivation in theory andpractice (Domyei,1994; Williams,1997; Schumann,1998), and discussed themotivation components. The researchers and scholars from empirical methodsstudy the internal structure of second language motivation (Schudmit, etal.1996;Tremblay, etal.1995). In contrast, the domestic research on motivation isrelatively late, but for a long time we did not attach great importance toresearch students English learning motivation, some just generalitiesintroduction of foreign research results. And most of the studies are about highschool and undergraduate students, the studies on higher vocational collegestudents English are relatively few. In recent years, vocational education as animportant part of higher education is developing rapidly. The quality of highervocational education is paid more and more attention. The higher vocationalcollege students do not only have techniques but also have knowledge.However, due to higher vocational college students entrance exam score is nothigh, especially English scores are generally low and the students show low interest in learning English. So it is urgent to enhance and foster students English learning motivation. Therefore, the author conducts this investigation.In an attempt to answer the following questions:1. What types of English learning motivation do the vocational andtechnical college students have?2. Is there any significant difference between art and science students, maleand female students, the students from village and city, high achievers andlow achievers in types of motivation?This investigation is based on the previous researches on Chineseundergraduates English motivation (Gao,2003). The investigation wasconducted in the city of Baotou, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.240students from three vocational technical colleges are studied. Through thequestionnaire designed by Gao (2003), the author conducted an investigationon vocational college students English motivation. The findings are processedwith the help of SPSS17.0software, using descriptive analysis, statisticalmethods of variance analysis, correlation analysis, the relationship between thecomposition of the motivation factors and individual differences amongstudents. The findings show that the participants in this investigation havemedium degree of motivation. The vocational college students in Bao Tou Citymainly have the motivation of individual development, immediate achievement,going abroad, social responsibility, information medium, going abroad,learning situation and intrinsic interest.