An Empirical Study Of Teacher's Support On English Learning Demotivation Of Secondary Vocational Students

Motivation plays an important role in learning.The positive aspect of motivation can promote learning while the negative aspect namely demotivation would hinder learning.At present,there are many researches on the demotivation in English learning and they mainly focus on the influencing factors.Besides,many researches have proved that teacher-related factors exert a great influence,however there are few empirical researches which control one of the influencing factors to make a study.Relevant studies have shown that teacher's support can meet students' basic psychological needs and thus affect students' learning motivation and academic performance.The author first conducted a questionnaire survey on 137 students who have English courses in Fengzhen vocational secondary school in Inner Mongolia.The result showed that students have demotivation in English learning and teacher-related influencing factors account for a large proportion.It is worthwhile for us to study how to give teacher's support effectively in order to reduce students' demotivation in English learning and improve their academic performance.Therefore,based on the previous researches and the current situation,the study takes 45 students who major in computer science from two parallel classes of grade two as the research subjects.The study mainly discusses the following three research questions:1.What is the intensity of students' demotivation in English learning?2.Can teacher's support reduce their demotivation in English learning?3.If their demotivation is reduced,will the students' English performance be improved?The whole teaching experiment lasted for 3 months.With the help of hierarchical teaching method and task-based teaching method,the experimental group got teacher's support from three aspects: cognition,autonomy and emotion.The research instruments mainly include questionnaires,tests and two interviews with students in the experimental group.Two pretests are made to make sure there is no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in the demotivation intensity and English performance.Two post-tests are designed to find out whether teacher's support could reduce students' demotivation in English learning and whether reduced demotivation could help improve their English performance.Before the experiment,some students in the experimental group were selected for interview to know the reasons of their demotivation so that the teacher can give teacher's support more accurately.After the experiment,these students were interviewed again for the research results.The main findings of the study are as follows: 1)The mean score range of 10 items in the demotivation intensity questionnaire of the two groups is between 2.00 and 3.00,indicating that demotivation of students in English learning is very high.2)Compared with the pretest of English learning demotivation,the students' learning demotivation decreased significantly,especially in the experimental group.In addition,according to the results of t-test,there is a significant difference in the demotivation intensity between the experimental group and the control group(p<0.05),which indicates that under the same conditions of other variables,teacher's support with hierarchical teaching method and task-based teaching method can effectively reduce students' demotivation in English learning.3)Students' English performance was not significantly improved after the experiment and there was no significant difference(p>0.05)between the experimental group and control group on English performance but the results showed that there was an upward trend in the English performance of the experimental group.Finally,in view of the influencing factors on demotivation in English learning for students in vocational secondary school,some corresponding suggestions are presented to help students reduce their English learning demotivation.Meanwhile,feasible suggestions for improving English teacher's teaching effect are put forward to helpstudents learn English.Recommendations are also proposed for future research.