English-Study Motivation For Senior Primary School Students Whose Parents Are Migrant Workers In Cities

While more than 200,000,000 migrant workers fluxed into cities to look for jobs, they brought along their children who were at the age to receive the nine-year compulsory education in cities. However, as those children started learning English in poorly staffed country schools and their mobile life lead to change their schools frequently, they have a lousy command of language knowledge and skills, and their interest in English learning is not very strong.The author once worked as an intern teacher of English in a government primary school set up for migrant children in Wenzhou and this experience gave author a particular interest in this group of students. Thus the author decided to conduct a research project into the English learning motivation of the senior students in the school. While doing survey of literature, the author found that most similar studies have been focused on senior middle school students and little research work has been done on junior middle school and primary school students. The subjects of the current research are 150 students in Grades 5 and 6 of Shacheng No. 3 Primary School located in Longwan District(a high-tech development zone) of Wenzhou City. The aims of this research project is to find out the students’ English learning motivation viaquestionnaire plus interview and classify them based on scholar Gao Yihong’s the major motivation types. Then statistical comparisons are made to determine the differences or lack of differences between the two genders and between Grade 5 and Grade 6. Next try to find which family factors influence on their English learning motivation most.The research yields four discoveries:(1) The English learning motivation is relatively strong among migrant students of Grades 5 and 6. These students have different types of English learning motivation, such as sense of social responsibility, personal development, media influence, learning interest, learning situation and score motives, listed in descending order of student number affected.(2) There is not too much difference in English learning motivation between males and females. However, the mean scores of females are a little bit higher than those of males in learning interest, score motives, learning situation and sense of social responsibility.(3) There isn’t any significant difference between Grade 5 and Grade 6migrant students in various factors of English learning motivation except that the two grades are somewhat different in terms of score motives and learning situation. Migrant students in Grade 5 having stronger score motives and learning situation motives than migrant students in Grade 6.(4) Family structure and parents’ two-shift working time has negative influences on those students’ English learning motivation, especially in classperformance and homework.The four discoveries lead to contemplate about possible improvements. It is proposed that the local government authorities remove certain restrictive policies; the school elicit support from parents and upgrade the faculty team;parents cooperate with the school to give children support in their English studies; and teachers forsake out-dated notion of English education and establish new teacher-student relationships.As this is a case study which is by nature small in scale, the author advises that future researchers in this area do similar researches in other regions of China to test the representative power of the current research. The author also suggests that future researchers use a theoretical modal other than Gao Yihong’s to see if we could dig deeper into the English learning motivation of children whose parents are migrant rural laborers working in cities.