An Empirical Study On English Majors' Legal English Learning

Many universities in China have offered legal English courses to cultivate professionals who should master not only law but also English in the law field.SWUPL is the first one to do so.In the past twenty years,SWUPL has cultivated excellent professionals engaged in legal English.However,the number of such professionals is small because large quantities of students have chosen to be teachers in high school instead.For this phenomenon,something should be done to explore the reasons.Currently,related research has largely been conducted from the theoretic perspective,mostly from the aspect of teaching rather than learning.Based on the self-determination theory under the motivation theory,this thesis intends to make an empirical study on legal English learning from learners' aspect.This study intends to find out learners' different types of regulation and motivation for legal English learning according to the self-determination theory as well as the relationships between learners' motivations and their grades.Questionnaires were employed to collect data and SPSS and AMOS analyze data.Firstly this study detected learners' different regulation ways in different levels.Then different types of regulation were divided into corresponding motivation types according to the self-determination theory.At last,the relationships between motivation types and grades were analyzed.The results showed that learners who possessed more identified regulation and intrinsic motivation,i.e,autonomous motivation obtained relatively high grades than those who possessed more controlled motivation.Therefore,the author of this thesis suggests that in the process of teaching,teachers should lay more emphasis on students' autonomous motivation,cultivating students to learn out of their willingness instead of adopting controlling methods,for example,adopting punishment to make learners learn.