A Study Of Stimulating Bilingual Students’ English Learning Motivation In Primary School In The Ethnic Minority Area

It was decided to strengthen the foreign language teaching in the ethnic minority area by the Ministry of Education in 2001. Furthermore, English has become the most important and required course in 21st Century. Therefore it will have a great significance on more effectively improving the students’learning motivation in the ethnic minority area.Researches on motivation for foreign language learning started in 1950s by Canadian psychologists, Gardner and Lambert. And the researches of motivation have been carried out in China since 1980s, and most of the researches concentrated on the motivation of college or university students and the students who are in the middle school. There are few studies in primary school, especially the studies of the Mongolian nationality bilingual primary school students in ethnic minority area. Therefore, according to the previous studies, the present study concentrates on the English learning motivation of the Mongolian nationality bilingual students of primary school. There were three main purposes in this study. Firstly, it aimed to identify the motivation types about the Mongolian nationality bilingual primary school students. Secondly, it aimed to explore the relationship between the Mongolian nationality bilingual students’ English learning motivation and their academic achievement by using the motivation strategies. Thirdly, it aimed to improve the students’ academic achievement in English language learning and promote the author’s professional achievement.For the need of this study, the sample of this study comprised 60 students of the Grade5 in Cheng Guan Primary School in Mongolia Autonomous County of Cheboksary. There were 30 Mongolian nationality bilingual students from bilingual Class9 and 30 Mongolian nationality bilingual students from bilingual ClasslO.The former class was regarded as the control class and the later class was regarded as the experiment class during the experiment.The instruments of this study mainly included tests and questionnaires. They were analyzed by Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and SPSS 17.0.The results of the study were summed up as follows:1. The Mongolian nationality bilingual students of primary school were mainly motivated by achievement motivation before experiment, but they were motivated by intrinsic motivation after experiment.2. The Mongolian nationality bilingual students’ intrinsic motivation was stimulated after adapting the appropriate motivation strategies and their English achievement was improved.3. The sense of achievement is the most powerful drive for English learning. Extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation are of equal importance to English learning and maintain motivation is of great importance to improve English learning.In sum, it could be concluded from the results of the experiment that introduced motivation strategies into English teaching was quite feasible and effective from the aspect of improving the students’ learning motivation, and it could help students learn English better and improve their achievement. The author believed that the application of motivation strategies will bring about certain implication and influence to future foreign language teaching in ethnic minority area of China.