An Investigation Of Students' English Learning Motivation Differences From The Perspective Of Self-determination Theory

As English becomes increasingly important in the world and in our daily life,more and more educators and scholars start to be concerned with how to learn English effectively.Gradually,they found that stimulating learners' learning motivation could help learners study English.So a large number of theories about motivation came into being.At first,the motivation theories were mainly explored in the psychological field and then the exploration began to extend to the linguistic field.Self-determination theory,one of the motivation theories well recognized and applied in both linguistics and psychological fields,forms the basic theoretical framework of this research.The current research investigated learning motivation at school levels and found there were indeed differences in their learning motivation,i.e.intrinsic motivation,integrated regulation,identified regulation,introjected regulation,external regulation,amotivation,going abroad motivation and the overall motivation,which gave us some enlightenment in teaching.Three research questions are:(1)What are the similarities and differences of students' English learning motivation at different school levels and how does students' English learning motivation tend to change from lower to higher school levels?(2)What factors are related to students' learning motivation?(3)What pedagogical implications can be recommended from this current research?Both quantitative research method(using questionnaire to collect data)and qualitative research method(using interview)were adopted in this research.The combination of the two methods was intended to generate more comprehensive and objective findings and produce convincing and adequate explanations.Main findings concerning the first question revealed that there were significant differences in learning motivation between different school levels.Students' intrinsic motivation,integrated regulation,introjected regulation,going-abroad motivation and overall motivation between different school levels decline with school level increasing in general.The students between different levels didn't show substantial differences in the areas of identified regulation,external regulation and amotivation.Follow-up interviews were conducted to explore causes and reasonsbehind the findings.Findings relating to the second question showed that there were five factors influencing students' learning motivation,i.e.students' perceived competence of English,students' perspectives on English teacher,students' class involvement,students' self-efficacy and students' perspectives on group work.In general,with the increase of students' perceived competence,involvement and self-efficacy,students' intrinsic motivation,integrated regulation,identified regulation,introjected regulation,external regulation,amotivation,going abroad motivation and overall motivation increase accordingly,except the fact that with the increase of students' involvement,primary school students' and junior high school students' external regulation decline.What's more,the more positive students' perspectives on English teacher and group work are,the higher the students' intrinsic motivation,integrated regulation,identified regulation,introjected regulation,external regulation,amotivation,going abroad motivation and overall motivation are.The third question is put forward according to the factors mentioned above.The teachers should improve themselves and design the teaching carefully.They should also keep good relationship with their students and care about their students and so on.In the end,limitations of this research were discussed and the author will do a better one by transcending the limitations of this research in the future.