Teacher And Student Perceptions Of Motivational Strategies, And Effects Of These Strategies On Student Motivation And Achievement

This dissertation examines the issue of teachers’ and students’ perceptions ofmotivational strategy use and the effects of those strategies on students’ motivationand English achievement. It aims to fill two gaps of current research concerningmotivational strategies, one being that many studies either test student perceptions oftheir teachers’ behaviors or test teachers’ ratings of their own behaviors without takingboth into consideration; the other being that few researches directly investigate therelationship between the actual use of these strategies and student motivation orEnglish achievement. The participants consist of8teachers and268students from aschool in Dongying City, Shandong Province, which is located in the northeast ofChina. Three instruments are used to collect the research data: The TeacherQuestionnaire, The Student Questionnaire and English Test Papers.Results of the present study show that there is not much difference in how theeight teachers and their students perceive the use of the motivational strategies,indicating that the strategies used by teachers are on the whole successfully recognizedby their students. In addition, the strategy use reported by teachers as a whole is notfound to be directly related to their students’ motivation or English achievement.Certain aspects of students’ perceptions, however, are found to be correlated withsome motivational variables and students’ achievement. Besides, research data in thisstudy are also found to largely support the socio-educational model proposed byGardner (1979,1981,1983,1985a,2006,2007). Integrativeness, attitudes toward thelearning situation and anxiety are found to predict motivation, and the roles ofmotivation and anxiety as determinants of English achievement are also verified.