An Investigative Study Of Motivational Regulation Strategies Used By Senior High School English Learners

As a significant emotional factor,motivation can stimulate,maintain and regulate learners' learning in foreign language learning.Adopting appropriate motivational regulation strategies is beneficial for learners to develop the abilities of autonomous learning and lifelong learning.Whereas,the previous research on motivational regulation strategies mostly took college learners as subjects,only a few of them took high school learners as the subjects,and the conclusions were inconsistent.Therefore,the author adopts the paradigm of combining quantitative research and qualitative research to carry out the investigation on the application of motivational regulation strategies for high school learners.The research questions are as follows.(1)What is the overall pattern of motivational regulation strategies used by senior high school learners?(2)What are the differences in using motivational regulation strategies in terms of learners' gender?(3)What are the relations between learners' motivational regulation strategies and their English achievement?In this study,a questionnaire survey was conducted among 393 high school learners from Handan No.3 middle school,and six of them were interviewed.Overall perspective from the whole learners and vertical perspective from each grade are adopted to investigate the three research questions.The SPSS software was used to analyze data: Descriptive statistical analysis was used to study the use of motivational regulation strategies of high school learners;Independent sample t test was used to study the differences between male and female learners;Correlation analysis was used to study the relationship between motivational regulation strategies and English achievement.The results showed that:(1)High school learners use eight motivational regulation strategies with a medium to high frequency,among which the negative based incentive strategy is the most commonly used,while the interest enhancement and self-reward strategies are the least commonly used.The frequency of other strategies is ranked as: self-efficacy enhancement,performance self-talk,task value enhancement,volitional control,and mastery self-talk.Condition of each grade is slightly different.(2)There are significant differences between male and female learners on using motivational regulation strategies.Both from the overall perspective and the perspective of each grade,females use eight motivational regulation strategies more frequently than males.(3)From the overall perspective,four kinds of motivational regulation strategies are positively correlated with English achievement,which are performance self-talk,mastery self-talk,negative based incentive,and task value enhancement.From the perspective of each grade,self-efficacy enhancement strategy is added in the first grade on the basis of the four strategies mentioned above.The second grade and the third grade are the same as the overall situation with different correlation coefficients.Based on the above research results,the motivational regulation strategies play the crucial role in the process of foreign language learning.And foreign language teachers and learners should pay attention to the strategies of motivational regulation.Teachers should guide learners to learn and reasonably use motivational regulation strategies to handle some motivational problems.The individual differences of learners of different genders in different grades should be considered by teachers,and teachers should keep in accordance with learners' aptitude when cultivating learners to use motivational regulation strategies.Learners should also actively use strategies to improve learning motivation,thereby improving the efficiency of English learning.