A Study Of Senior High School Students' English Learning Demotivation

Motivation has been widely accepted by teachers and scholars as one of the key factors that influence students' learning behaviors,learning outcomes and learning autonomy.Therefore,fruitful research on motivation has been conducted at home and abroad,which is mainly focused on the positive influences of motivation on students' English learning.However,some previous studies began to pay their attention to the opposite side of motivation,demotivation,which is concerned with students' failures.Gorham & Christophel(1992)conducted a study on college students' perceptions of teachers' behaviors as motivating and demotivating factors,which is a trigger for demotivation research and provides a differently new perspective for long-term motivation study.From then on,studies on demotivation gradually get more and more attention.However,demotivation research in Chinese instructional communication is mainly focused on college or university learners,and few studies are concerned with senior high school students.Therefore,the present study is aimed to investigate the English learning demotivation degree of senior high school students and explores the demotivating factors influencing senior high school students' English learning and probes into distinctions of demotivating factors in terms of gender,grade,English proficiency and class type,and thereafter tries to put forward some practical suggestions corresponding to the demotivation phenomenon of senior high school students.In the present study,the author adopted two research approaches including questionnaire and student-related interview.The questionnaire is composed of two subquestionnaires.Namely,one including 9 items is for examining the demotivation degree of participants and the other involving 45 items is used for exploring the demotivating factors perceived by participants.The student-related interview is employed to further explain and to supplement the results of questionnaire.The results of this study indicate that demotivation is a pervasive phenomenon among senior high school students.What's more,there exist significant differences of demotivation degree in terms of grade and different English proficiency levels.Besides,this study suggests that twelve demotivating factors are extracted from 45 items and they are ranked according to the demotivating effects perceived by participants in a descending order: past failure experiences,lack of learning strategies,school facilities,lack of confidence,learning materials,lack of interest,teachers' methods,curriculum planning,peer influences,teachers' competence,family environment,teachers' behavior.Meanwhile,significant differences also exist among twelve factors in terms of gender,grade,English proficiency and class type.Furthermore,the results of student-related interview indicate that teachers' behavior,teachers' methods,learning materials,past failure experiences,learning environment,peer influences and family environment are perceived by five participants as demotivating factors,which is congruent with the results of questionnaire.