An Empirical Study Of Motivational Regulation Strategies Used By International Students Learning Chinese As A Foreign Language

Motivation is an essential factor for language learning.It can help learners adopt different techniques or strategies to improve their learning process.The use of motivational regulation strategies can encourage students to control and monitor their progress and increase their skills.Previous research has mainly focused on the role of the teacher in the learning process and the strategies used in the classroom,only a few scholars have studied the role of student?s motivation on language learning,thus there is still a lot of research that can be done.In this framework,this study examines the use of motivational regulation strategies on international students learning Chinese as a foreign language.This study proposed a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative data to examine the use of motivational strategies,the participants for this research are international students that are learning Chinese as a second language.The research proposes three questions:(1)What is the general situation of the use of motivational regulation strategies?(2)Does the use of motivational regulation strategies differ across three levels(basic,intermediate and advanced)?(3)What is the correlation between the use of motivational regulation strategies and Chinese language proficiency?The present study was conducted at a university in Zhejiang Province,China.The data used for the research was based on a questionnaire proposed by Wolters(2013)in his study of motivational regulation strategies on college students.The data was collected from 130 international students enrolled in the Chinese language learning program of the academic period 2019,15 of them were interviewed.SPSS 19.0 software program was used to analyze quantitative data.The analysis was divided into three parts.First,a descriptive analysis was used to examine the use of motivational regulation strategies,second ANOVA analysis helped understand the differences between the three levels(basic,intermediate and advanced).Finally,correlation analysis was used to study the relationship between the use of motivational regulation strategies and Chinese language proficiency.The results were correlated with the qualitative data collected from the interview.The results of the study showed that:(1)The use of the six motivational regulation strategies(environmental control,self-consequating,interest enhancement,performance self-talk,mastery self-talk and task value enhancement)was present in all three levels with a medium frequency.The quantitative data had an overall mean score of(M=2.26).The lower the mean score is,the higher the level of use.The strategies,with an order of most frequently used to less,are mastery self-talk(M=1.93),task-value enhancement(M=2.06),environmental control(M=2.17),interest enhancement(M=2.19),performance self-talk(M=2.35)and self-consequating(M=2.36).(2)There were some differences between each of the three levels(basic,intermediate and advanced).The results from the ANOVA analysis stated that the advanced level had the highest values in the use of motivational regulation strategies,in comparison with the other two levels,with a mean score of(M=1.80),followed by basic level with(M=1.94),and finally intermediate level with(M=2.00).The values between the levels were similar,giving a low difference significance from one level to another.All of the strategies were used in the three levels,selfconsequating being the one with the highest level of difference.(3)The correlation between the use of the strategies and proficiency level based on HSK exam score was analyzed according to the Pearson correlation statistics,based on a scale of 0 to 0.3,low correlation;0.3 to 0.8,mediumrelated and 0.8 to 1,high correlation.The strategy that had the highest correlation was mastery self-talk(.638),followed by environmental control(.52),task-value enhancement(.510),performance self-talk(.332),self-consequating(0.324)and interest enhancement(.138).The results showed a medium to low correlation,therefore it cannot be concluded that there is a direct correlation of the two variables.Based on the findings of this study,the use of motivational regulation strategies is important for the language learning process and students seem to be aware of it.Learners need to pay attention to the use of these strategies to improve their academic results,the differences between levels should also be considered by teachers to promote and maintain the overall motivation inside and outside the classroom.Further studies are suggested,to include a bigger sample and also to explore the use of more motivational regulation strategies.