| Motivation is a kind of inner power which could propel and maintain an individual to head to a specific direction. Learning motivation is a kind of specific motivation to make learners engage in learning tasks, which is positively correlated to learning effectiveness and activities. In other words, what stimulates an individual to make efforts to learn new things is the active learning motivation. Therefore, learning motivation plays a critical role in the whole process of learning English. Although a large number of experts and talents at home have been working on learners' learning motivation, most of them always take learners in universities as subjects and less of them consider learners in vocational education as subjects.In recent years, with the rapid development of economy and technology, more and more industries are in need of talents who are applied, vocational and technical, which not only can give impetus to the rapid expansion of vocational education in China, but also can accelerate the pace of experts to find effective strategies to make learners in vocational colleges meet the need of this society. However, learners in vocational colleges, as a special group to be educated, have their own traits. So it is necessary to do studies on them both for the requirement of this society and for the educational system.Based on the important role of learning motivation in English learning process and the requirement of industries for applied, vocational and technical talents, this thesis aims to dig out the reason why learners in vocational colleges are different from those in universities and to give suggestions to inspire learners' learning motivation.This thesis firstly makes an elaborate analysis of learners' learning motivation in vocational colleges both at home and abroad and gives an introduction to the relationships between learning motivation, learning activities and learning effectiveness. Secondly, in the light of Biggs' theory of learning motivation, this thesis makes an investigation of the randomly selected 60 learners who get the higher scores in English and 60 learners who get the lower scores from Hunan Vocational College of Commerce. This thesis tries the best to collect data by doing questionnaire, Practical English Test for Colleges and individual discussion with the help of qualitative and quantitative research. Then, it takes bothcorrelation and T-test to handle those data.The result of the research shows :(1) There is a specific learning motivation and a universal rule for students in vocational education to learn English.(2) There are some differences in learning motivation between learners who get the higher scores in English and learners who get the lower scores in it;(3) Successful learners would be more interested in English and have a stronger achievement motivation and self-efficacy, and they always attribute their failure to some controllable factors.Thirdly, this thesis provides several learning strategies to help learners in vocational colleges to improve their English learning level. Finally, it conducts a survey on the selected50 learners as the experiment group and the other 50 learners as the control group in order to prove the fact that learning strategies, to some extent, can improve learners' learning motivation and help them to overcome difficulties in English. By only teaching learning strategies for the experiment group in 5 months, we find out that learners in the experiment group get higher scores in English than those in the control group.It is concluded that learners in vocational colleges are out of the external motivation to learn English, and most of them can't make suitable attribution for their failure in English.Therefore, it is important to teach them some practical learning strategies to improve their learning effectiveness in English, such as the improvement of learners' interest in English, the advancement of their confidence and the training of suitable attribution. |
PDF Full Text Request