An Investigation Into The Demotivation Factors Of Chinese EFL College Students

Since motivation is one of the central elements in SLA field, a higher demotivation is helpful for English learning.With the reduction of interest and the lack of confidence on learners in learning English detected, demotivation has been drawn the attention of scholars in recent years in international and domestic scope.Originally, D?rnyei(2005) regarded demotivation as “specific external forces that reduce or diminish the motivational basis of behavioral intention or an ongoing action”. With the depth of researches, it is a common consensus that demotivation is defined as the “specific internal and external forces that reduce or diminish the motivational basis of a behavioral intention or an ongoing action”(Dornyei, 2005). In this paper, internal and external factors are both taken into consideration. Previous studies mainly attempted to concentrate on the present situation of the second language demotivation, demotivation factors and the differences of demotivation intensity between each variable. Whereas few studies has conducted the investigation from individual differences, that is to say, the question needed to be examined.Based on different proficiency learners, this paper aims to explore the differences of demotivation intensity and factors between different proficiency learners and the correlation between internal and external factors, in which 133 college students are partcipated in the research. All the participants are non-English majors of sophomores in Jiangxi Normal University. The participants firstly are required to fill in the questionnaire are divided into different English proficiency levels according to the scores of their College English Test Band Four. One is high proficiency group. The other is low proficiency group. The students whose scores are over 500 are chosen as the high proficiency group.The others who have not passed the exam are selected as the low proficiency group. Meanwhile, in order to further verify the currency of the results, 15 demotivated learners will be interviewed. We used the SPSS to analyze the data collected in the questionnaire.The results of study show that demotivation is a common phenomenon in EFL classroom. What's more, there are significant differences in demotivation intensity between high-proficiency students and low-proficiency students. Learners with different proficiency share different degrees of demotivation intensity. Lowproficiency language learners have stronger demotivation degree than highproficiency language learners. Besides, Significant difference were found in demotivation factors with language-proficiency learners, there is a obvious correlation between internal and external factors, where external environment factors have distinctive predictive power for the student factors.