An Investigation Into The Influence Of Role-play On The L2Students’ Learning Motivation And Achievement Scores In Chinese Junior Middle School

In2001，Curriculum Reform of Elementary Education Outline has pointed out thatstudents should be equipped with positive learning attitude, acitve participation, and scientificinquiry ability. Also, students should be cultivated to develop their ability to gather andprocess information, the ability to analyze and solve problems, and communicate andcooperate. Thus，students should be the center in the teaching. It has been an urgent task, toestablish a learning atmosphere full of relaxation, democracy and encouragement to booststudents’ English learning interest. The teaching method of role-play is considered aneffecitve way to achieve these goals. However, in the traditional English teaching class, theteacher is always the center and usually takes the cramming education so that studentspassively receive the information, lose the interest and their creaitvity and languagecommunicative competence have been seriously damaged in a long run.Role-play is related to a kind of classroom activity representing and expressing experience by giving students more chances to practice the target language饥d to perform inthe classroom or exchanging different roles to experience a situation or solve some problemsthat may happen in the reality.Based on researches on role-play at home and abroad, this study mainly discusses theinfluence of the role-play on English learning motivation in junior middle school. In theprocess, the author took role-play in the experimental class while in the control class studentslearned by the traditional methods.In the research, the author adopted test and questionnaire to discover the influence ofthe role-play on English learning motivation. The study aims to answer the following threequestions:(1)Ho"wwill the activity “role-play” influence students’ English learning motivation injunior middle school?(2)H”owwill the activity “role-play influence student’s English instrumentalmotiavation and integrated motivation, internal motivation and external motivation?(3)Dostudents’ achievement scores improve if their English learning motivationbecome greater than before?The study lasted for two months, about9weeks. The86participants are all from No.4Junior Middle School in Yaodu district of Linfen city This is a public school. They are all inGrade Eight. Each class has43students. Before the experiment, the86participants wereasked to take the examination and the English learning motivation questionnaire. It is foundthat there is no significant difference in English achievement test before the experiment. In theprocess of the experiment, the teacher, the teaching time and teaching textbooks are the samefor the two classes except the activity ""role-play. One of the classes is experimental classwhere the rearranged activity "role-play" based on the real life situations would be taken. Theother is control class where the traditional method would be taken. After the experiment,students were asked to t^e the mid-term examination held by the school and the English learning motivation questionnaire.After analyzing the data with SPSS19.0，the researcher make the followingconclusions.Firstly，role-play is helpful to improve English le犯iiers’ motivation (instrumental andintegrated motivation, intenral and extenral motivation) in junior middle school, especiallyinternal motivation and integrated motivation. Compared with the traditional methods,students in EC show more specific learning aims, more positive learning attitude, moreinterest in learning English, higher self-efficacy and expected value. At the same time, theyare more satisfied with extenral factors. As a result, role-play is very helpful to improve‘students English learning motivation in junior middle school in most aspects.Secondly，compared with the traditional method，students in EC improved theirachievement scores and there is a significant difference between EC and CC. It is indicatedthat role-play is more benef’icial to prompt students score than traditional method.Thirdly, it is found that Person Correlation indexes between motivation and score (post-test) are greater than zero. It is indicated that the relationship between them is positivelyrelated and linear. It is obvious that role-play is helpful to promote student’s motivation andthus improve their achievement scores. In turn, the improvement of score could enhance theirmotivation.