An Analysis On Chinese Learners’ Motivation Construction In Ci-uhm Based On The Grounded Theory

Last decade has witnessed the inexorable spread of Chinese globally,which made it crucial to study the motivation of overseas Chinese leaners.The Confucius Institute at University of Hawaii at Manoa(CI-UHM)has Chinese learners who differ greatly in age and background,and their motivation varies from each other,too.Owning to the one-year working experience in CI-UHM,we are able to dig into their motivation and conduct the study.The aim of this research is to define and construct Chinese leaners’ motivation model in CI-UHM by means of a qualitative procedure that is relatively rarely used in L2 studies:Grounded Theory.The procedures of our research are as follows:data collection,interview transliteration,coding process and model verification.During which,a 50000 words’document and 35 questionnaires were analyzed,using survey data collected from multiple sources including students’ responses to a questionnaire,interviews with some of the students,and 3 semester-long retrospective journal.Data were analyzed using coding procedures suggested by grounded theory,which includes open coding,axial coding and selective coding.15 concepts were summarized and divided into 3 concept sets:1)social-cultural background,2)core motivation,3)study experience in Confucius Institute.Following the paradigm model,we finally figured out the relationship among those concepts.Results indicate that the social-cultural background affects students’ core motivation and then influence their study experience in CI,which in turn has effects on the social-cultural background and core motivation.How students balance their complex background,core motivation and learning experience determines their motivation,which is in a dynamic circle.Taking CI-UHM as an example,this study managed to construct Chinese learners’motivation under specific situation and analyzed the dynamic transformation with consideration to factors such as social-cultural context,self-definition and learning context.The application of grounded theory in motivation analysis brings new research method in the multicultural context and thus offers targeted suggestions to stimulate students’motivation as well as the global promotion of Chinese.