A Study On The Influence Of Teachers’ Support On English Underachievers’ Negative Motivation In Junior High Schools

Motivation is initiative in the process of foreign language learning.The theory of negative motivation is established on the basis of motivation theory,and it is the reverse transfer of the original motivation theory.Now,researches at home and abroad mainly focus on the classification of influential factors on the negative motivation.And very few researches explore how to control one factor to reduce the intensity of negative motivation.What’s more,many researches choose college students,especially non-English majors as the research subject,while few researches focus on junior high school students,especially the English underachievers.Studies have shown that teachers’support can satisfy students’ basic psychological needs which can affect students’ learning motivation and academic performance.Based on self-determination theory,this research chooses the English underachievers in grade eight as the subject to discover whether teachers’ support can reduce the underachievers’ negative motivation and then improve their academic performance effectively.By reviewing the research achievements on negative motivation and teachers’support at home and abroad,this thesis puts forward three hypotheses on the underachievers based on the reality of current education in China:junior high school English underachievers generally have high negative motivation;teachers’ support can help reduce the intensity of English underachieves’ negative motivation effectively in junior high schools;the decline of English underachieves’ negative motivation can further improve their English academic performance.This research has conducted a questionnaire survey to the research subjects before and after the experiment with the purpose of measuring out their negative motivation intensity.At the same time,this study also conducted a three-month teaching experiment in order to further validate the influence of teachers’ support on underachievers’ negative motivation.This thesis is expected to provide certain reference for teachers’ work of helping underachievers.Finally,the experimental results of this study is analyzed and it shows that it’s a common phenomenon that junior high school English underachievers have higher negative motivation,some of them even have very high intensity.Teachers’ support can increase underachievers’ interest in English learning and reduce the negative motivation intensity effectively,but its influence on underachievers’ academic performance is not significant.This result may be affected by time.