A Study On The Relationship Between English Learning Motivation Types And Self-identity Changes Among High School Students

With the increasingly deepening of foreign language teaching in China,many scholars begin to shift their attention from teaching methodology to language learners. Recently, the concentration on language learners’ social psychology has been an original research trend, in which studies on learning motivation and self-identity of language learners attract the most attention. Therefore, for the purpose of acquiring the relationship between foreign language learning motivation and self-identity changes, both qualitative and quantitative researches are adopted in this paper. The subjects are 240 students from an ordinary high school in Xi’an. They are requested to finish an questionnaire and receive interviews. Based on the research results, the author discussed the overall situation as well as the diversities in different genders and grades about motivation types and self-identity changes among high school students.Lastly, the relationship between motivation types and self-identity changes have been researched, which extends the previous studies. The results show: Seven kinds of motivation types are all existing among high school students in China. On the whole,the sequential order from the highest to the lowest is individual development, going abroad, intrinsic interest, immediate achievement, information medium, social responsibility, learning situation. Motivation types are different among different grades. After learning English, students in high school have experienced some self-identity changes. The sequential order of self-identity changes from the highest to the lowest is zero change, addictive change, self-confidence, productive change, split change, subtractive change. Also, different changes exist in different grades. Girls are higher than boys in most of the motivation types such as intrinsic interest, social responsibility, going abroad, information medium, learning situation. Only in immediate achievement, boys are higher than girls. About individual development,boys and girls are completely similar. In self-identity changes, boys and girls go through some differences. In self-confidence, productive change and addictive change,girls have experienced the stronger changes than boys. And in other three aspects,boys experience more changes than girls. Correlation analysis shows that there aresignificant correlations between most dimensions of English learning motivation types and dimensions of self-identity changes. From the regression analysis we can see that English learning motivation has significant influence on self-identity changes.Intrinsic interest has a very strong relationship with productive change and addictive change. Immediate achievement is highly related to self-confidence. Motivation types that can predict split changes and subtractive changes are mostly external motivations such as immediate achievement, social responsibility.The research results can provide useful guidance for teachers to further know the social psychology of foreign language learners and adopt effective measures in teaching so as to activate students’ learning motivation as well as improve learning effectiveness.