What Demotivates Senior High School Students’ English Learning In Rural Country Taking A Group Of Second Year Students In No.2 High School In Huxian County As An Example

Since the 1970 s, individual differences in language learning havebeen attached great importance including many significant factors, suchas learning aptitude, intelligence, gender, age, learning styles, learningstrategies, affective variables, ect. Motivation, as a significant componentof affective variables, can arouse learner’s learning interest and improvetheir learning efficiency and finally determine the rate and ultimatesuccess of language learning and teaching. Due to its importance,motivation has become a hotly discussed issue in second languageacquisition(SLA) field. Therefore, relevant researches have come intobeing and have been proved fruitful. The research findings have offeredmany effective pedagogical implications for school administrators,teachers.However, in some English classes in China, students often feeldisappointed, and even frustrated. They seem to be ready to give upEnglish learning. Therefore, how to maintain and promote students’ motivation becomes an urgent question. To answer this question andsolve the problem, we should first find out what demotivates students’ English learning in order to minimize or rid of the detrimentaldemotivators.A 28 4-point Likert type questions about demotivation wascompleted by 188 second year seniors in No. 2 High School in HuxianCounty. An exploratory factor analysis was applied, and finally fourdemotivating factors were extracted:(a) teacher-related factors;(b)learner-related factors;(c) learning material-related factors;(d) learningenvironment-related factors. The results showed that the statisticallysignificant difference existing between participants with high-proficiencyand participants with low-proficiency in terms of teacher-related factors,learner-related factors, and learning material-related factors, whereas nostatistical difference was found for learning environment-related factors.What’s more, this study also showed that there were some correlationsbetween English proficiency and learner-related factors, learningmaterial-related factors, and teacher-related factors. However, there wasno correlation between English proficiency and learningenvironment-related factors.Theoretically, this thesis deepens readers’ understanding aboutmotivation from the other facet. Functionally, based on the three researchquestions, some available and effective pedagogical implications are putforward for the school administrators, teachers and students in order toavoid demotivation phenomenon in the Chinese rural senior high school.The present empirical research also has three limitations.Recommendations for future researches are proposed.