A Study Of Strategic Interventions In Middle School Students’ English Learning Motivation Based On Ideal L2 Self

Motivation is important for L2/FL learners to maintain a language,but it is not easy for language teachers to stimulate and maintain students’ learning motivation.D?rnyei pointed out that the L2 Motivational Self System(L2MSS)can explain L2/FL learners‘ learning motivation,which consists of Ideal L2 Self(IL2S),Ought-to L2 Self(OL2S)and L2 Learning Experience(L2LE)and he strengthened that IL2 S has a strong capacity to promote L2 learners to learn the target language.Based on IL2 S,D?rnyei summarized six motivational strategies(namely,construction of the IL2S;imagery enhancement;making the IL2 S plausible;developing an action plan;activating the IL2 S and considering failure),which aim to help L2 learners construct and enhance their IL2 S to improve their L2 learning motivation,but a few researches discuss the effectiveness of the six IL2S-based motivational strategies applied to the middle school students.Therefore,this study explores the incentive effects of above six strategies on Chinese middle school students‘ Ideal English Self(IES)and English learning motivation by strategic interventions,questionnaire research and semi-structure interview.The research focuses on solving the following questions.(1)What is the participants‘ evaluation on the incentive effects of each intervention strategy on their IES and English learning motivation?(2)Do the strategic interventions improve the participants‘ IES?(3)If the participants‘ IES is improved,does their English learning motivation be also strengthened?A total of 83 Grade One students in a middle school in Maoming City,Guangdong Province formed the experimental group(N=40)and the control group(N=43).The strategic interventions(including eight activities)lasted for 18 weeks on the experimental group,to construct and enhance participants‘ IES and English learning motivation;at the same time,participants of control group received normal pedagogy.Before and after the strategic interventions,two five-point Likert scale questionnaires were administered to collect pretest and posttest data.Qualitative data were collected by three semi-structure interviews and activity reports.Descriptive analysis,independent samples-T test and paired samples-T test were carried out by SPSS 20.0 in this study.The research finds that in the experimental group:(1)the participants‘ overall evaluation on the effectiveness of the six intervention strategies is high and they think different motivational strategies have different incentive effects on their IES and English learning motivation.(2)The strategic interventions can effectively help most of the participants to create and maintain their IES.(3)The results of qualitative analysis show that the majority of the participants believe that their English learning motivation is strengthened;however,the results of quantitative analysis show that the strategic interventions can‘t effectively improve participants‘ English learning motivation.