A Case Study Of Learners’ Motivation Changes In The Learning Process Of English Writing

English writing ability has become one of the most important criteria of qualified talents in the21st century, and there has been a growing concern on writing in college English teaching. However, the current status quo of college English writing teaching and learning in China is far from satisfactory:students’ lacking of interest and motivation towards English writing and writing teachers’unwillingness to teach writing are the common phenomena, which makes English writing teaching the weakest aspect in English teaching. In recent years, a growing number of second language acquisition researchers have shifted their attention to second language writing research, especially on writing learners. However, there are still some limitations. Most of those studies were carried out from the learners’cognitive perspective; few studies have focused on the affective field, writing motivation in particular.Motivation is one of the most important influential factors in second language learning, which has been confirmed by a large number of studies. However, previous studies on motivation mainly remained in general L2proficiency, and motivation related to L2writing has been rarely examined. Furthermore, most of the previous studies treat motivation as a static concept, and the dynamic nature of motivation has been overlooked. The only studies concerning English writing motivation are mostly limited in the static research on motivation. The dynamic inquiries into students’ writing motivation from the learner perspective have rarely been explored; especially the dynamic inquiries into the motivational factors. Therefore, in an effort to address this limitation, the present study aims to track the changes in students’ motivation from both the cross-sectional and longitudinal angles, to identify factors associated with changes in motivation and to inquire the distribution of these factors in different learning stages. The present study discusses the following three questions:Firstly, does the students’ writing motivation change during the writing learning process? If changes, how? Secondly, what factors lead to the changes in students’writing motivation? Thirdly, what are the distribution characteristics of these factors in different learning stages?The present study employs the qualitative method.29sophomores majoring in English in Shandong Agricultural University are chosen to be the participants of this study. And under the guidance of the Ground Theory, these29students’reflection journals of a semester are analyzed in detail. The current context of the study is a net-work based writing class in which the teacher and students, students and peers can interact with each other.The results yielded from the present study are presented as follows:Firstly, through the description and comparison of the students’writing motivation in the three stages, the result reveals that most students’ writing motivation does change in the whole writing learning process, and most students’ writing motivation has experienced a process of "lacking-generating-sustaining-internalizing" from the prewriting stage to postwriting stage. Secondly, the factors that affect the students’ motivation changes are diverse, and these factors mainly exist in three dimensions:Teacher, Learning Environment and Learner dimension. The factors in the three dimensions take different forms. Within teacher dimension, the factors include:teacher’s personal charisma, teaching methods, selection of writing topics and writing materials, teacher’s feedback. Within Learning Environment dimension, the factors include:encouraging and comfortable atmosphere for writing, interaction and inspiration among learner group. Within learner dimension, the factors include:the improvement of self-confidence, sense of achievement, new understandings of writing and themselves. Thirdly, through the statistical analysis of the factors affecting students’motivation changes at each stage, the result suggests that the main factors affecting the students’motivation are also changing in different learning stages.Finally, the researcher analyzes and summarizes the above results. Meanwhile, grounded on the above results, some teaching strategies are put forward in the hope of providing some guidance for the English writing teaching.