An Empirical Study On Promoting Students’ Motivation In Learning English Via Employing Inspirational Movies

This empirical study is carried on students with low motivation on English learning from higher vocational college. Attempting to introduce in the approach of appreciating inspirational movies to the teaching of the higher vocational college, the author tests and verifies whether the inspirational movies class can arouse the motivation and enhance the achievement of English learners.In higher vocational college, students’ achievements are depressed, with a generally low level of motivation and interest, which beset the students and teachers of English all the time. Neither Chinese or foreign educators’ give more respect and recognize the introduction of English movies into foreign language teaching long before. However, most of the researches are only limited to train the skills of listening and speaking and the appreciation of literature of college or universities students, with no classification of specific to the selected films. As for the higher vocational college students, there are few researches on arousing the motivation and enhancing the achievement of English learners by adopting inspirational movies.Based on the theories, the motivation theories, Krashen’s input hypothesis, the Affective Filter Hypothesis, and the theory of Context, the research selected two natural classes from a higher vocational college of Hengshui in Hebei as control class(26 Ss) and experiment class(29 Ss). In a one-term teaching experiment with 14 weeks, traditional teaching plan and inspirational movies-based teaching plan will be carried out respectively in these two classes. During the experiment, the author applies some research methods including questionnaires, tests, and interviews. Research questions as follows: 1) Whether the inspirational movies class can arouse the motivation of English learners. 2) Whether the inspirational movies class can enhance the achievement of English learners. 3) How could inspirational movies class arouse the motivation and enhance the achievement of English learners? In which aspects the students perform? To what degree the achievement enhanced?Comparative analysis on the change of before and after the experiment and the performance in the experimental process of the two classes, the results of analysis of related data displayed as follows: 1) The inspirational movies class can arouse the motivation of English learners. The result reflected that the level of EFL learning motivation in the experimental class improved significantly than that in the control class. The experimental class improved greatly on the intrinsic motivation and the intensity motivation than that of the control class. Before the experiment, both of the two classes’ total motivation average scores are 2.71, and after the experiment the control class is 3.16, meanwhile, the experimental class is 3.42. The growth rate is greater of experimental class is larger than that of the control class. 2) English inspirational movies can improve the academic performance of students. Before the experiment, the control class’ s average score of pre-test is 87.76, and the experimental class’ s is 93.31. The significant value is 0.082, which means that the difference was not significant. After the test, the control class’ s average score of post-test is 93.03, and the experimental class’ s is 127.54. The significant value is 0.012, which means that the difference was significant. The experimental class’ s English learning achievement of post-test is significantly higher than its own in the pre-test and that of control class in the post-test; 3) Having greater powers of concentration than before and increasing the participation, the students improve significantly in the ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing of English.Showing that employing English inspirational movie class in higher vocational colleges could strengthen the students’ English learning motivation and improve learning achievement. This research has some reference value for teaching activities for higher vocational college teachers. As a guide, changing the old ideas of mouthpiece, the teacher should guide students to get more involved in the teaching process to make them become the leading role of listening, speaking, reading and writing ability training activities. However, there are also two shortcomings of this study: 1) The research subject is confined to a school, making the sample size too small; 2) I, as the researcher, take on the teaching mission of the research subject, what may influence the expression of the students’ true thoughts. Consequently, the popularization value of this research found needs to be verified in further expanding the scale of research subject.