A Survey On Motivational Regulation Strategies In English Learning Of Senior High School Students

Motivation is the driving force to induce and maintain individual’s activities, and make the activities move towards a certain goal. Since motivation is an internal psychological process its existence cannot be observed directly, the researchers can just indirectly infer from individuals’ behavior and their motivation intensity in their activities. Because of the instable features of learning motivation, learners who are good at self-regulating their motivation in the foreign language learning have more advantages. However, most of the existing researches are focused on the motivational regulation strategies use conditions of college students. Learners at different ages have different abilities, levels and methods to regulate their motivation. Hence, there is great significance to investigate the status of the senior high school students’ use of motivational regulation strategies for foreign language learning. This study will enrich the existing motivational regulation researches in foreign language learning. The present study is designed to investigate the senior high school students’ use of motivational regulation strategies and language learning strategies from urban area of Ganzhou city.This study composes of a quantitative survey and qualitative interview. The study mainly addresses the following questions:(1) what is the overall condition of the senior high school students’ motivational regulation strategies use?(2) What is the overall condition of senior high school students’ language learning strategies use?(3) What are the differences in the use of motivational regulation strategies for male and female students, different grades, arts and science students?(4) Are there any relations between the use of motivational regulation strategies and language learning strategies?The present study takes 260 students from two urban senior high schools of Ganzhou city as subjects and employs the SPSS 19.0 to analyze the collected data. Interview survey is the supplement for the questionnaire. Twelve students were interviewed after the mid-term exam. Six students with the highest scores while six students with the lowest scores.The results of this study indicate as following:1. Senior high school students’ use of the eight motivational regulation strategies reached a medium to high level, the total strategy use reached the high level. The using frequency of the eight strategies rank from high to low as follows: volitional control, self-efficacy enhancement, negative-based incentive, mastery self-talk, performance self-talk, task value enhancement, interest enhancement, and self-reward.2. Senior high school students’ use of the six language learning strategies reached a medium level which indicates that students’ use frequency of language learning strategies is not high.3. There are differences in the use of the eight strategies for students’ gender and grade. Female students get higher mean scores than male students of all the eight strategies, students in senior 1 get higher mean scores than students in senior 2. There is no significant difference between arts students and science students.4. This study also reveals that there is no significant correlation between the use of motivational regulation strategies and language learning strategies. Only performance self-talk, self-reward and task value enhancement have certain relevance, which illustrate that the use of learning strategies cannot help students to improve their use of motivational regulation strategies. Senior high school students should be given certain motivational regulation strategies training to improve their English learning motivation.