A Study Of The Correlations Between Junior High School Students’ Motivational Regulation Strategies And Their English Learning Engagement

Learning engagement as a relatively abstract concept in many people’s eyes plays a vital role in students’ language learning.Considering the limited amount of existing research regarding the combination of learning engagement and other factors,there is a felt need to incorporate other elements into learning engagement in the hope of increasing the level at which students engage into language learning.With the emergence of educational psychology,many researchers threw their insights into students’ motivation,psychological state,emotional factors et al,which facilitated the development of self-regulated learning theory.As a comparatively wide term,self-regulated learning contains cognitive regulation,metacognitive regulation,emotional regulation and motivational regulation.In this sense,this study attempts to select motivational regulation strategies as the research topic considering their recognized roles in language learning and the limitations of seeing motivation as a static concept in the previous study.According to the discussion above,the present study aims to explore whether there exist correlations between motivational regulation strategies and English learning engagement.The present study was conducted at Jiu Xian Middle School.In total,200 students from 8th-grade and 9th-grade took part in this study.The data sets were gained from two sources.One was a combined questionnaire consisting of modified version of Motivational Regulation Scale and Learning Engagement Scale;the other was interview by which more specific information will be gotten.The current study intends to answer the following research questions.(1)What is students’ self-reported use of motivational regulation strategies? Does there exist any differences in gender?(2)What is students’ level of English learning engagement? Does there exist any differences in gender?(3)To what extent do students’ motivational regulation strategies correlate with their English learning engagement?When the data were collected,8 copies were invalid,for students did not finish them effectively.In total,192 questionnaires were valid and used for analysis.Descriptive analysis results show that students tend to use motivational regulationstrategies moderately to high levels and their English learning engagement is at moderately high level.The Independent sample t-test results reveal that there exist gender differences in students’ use of motivational regulation strategies and their English learning engagement;female students are more likely to employ five motivational regulation strategies compared with male ones and female students’ level of learning engagement is higher than male students.Results of correlation analysis and multiple regression indicate that students’ motivational regulation strategies have significantly positive correlations with their English learning engagement and each strategy is considered as different predictor of learning engagement.