A Survey Of English Learning Motivation Of Junior Middle School Students

Learning motivation plays an essential role in learning English. In the course of learning foreign languages, students with strong motivation can always make good achievements while students without intrinsic motivation are often losers of language learning. Undoubtedly, motivation is a key factor to study successfully. In a lot of areas of China at present, foreign language teaching still carries on the old tradition as usual, regarding the teacher as the centre and ignoring students' decisive functions. What do we actually mean by the term motivation? What are the different factors that contribute to a person's motivation and how do they influence each other? What should a teacher do in order to train and excite middle school students' English learning motivation?In order to explore these questions, I firstly try to introduce studies on learning motivation abroad, current situations of learning motivation at home and then put forward significance of the present study. It involves definitions of motivation and some major motivation theories that are useful for middle school students. Behaviorist view lies in the fact that it gives too much emphasis to external factors of motivation but denying the importance of a fundamental element in the learning process. Cognitive view focuses on human being's mental processes, and are based on three aspects: self-efficacy theory, expectancy theory, goal theory. But it fails to provide an account of social and contextual influences. So I finally discuss the social constructivist view on motivation. Constructivism is now the most appealing research area in cognitive psychology. Its central idea is that individuals are actively involved in constructing personal meaning, which is their own personal understanding, from their experiences, constructive learning is a kind of intrinsically motivated learning. Students are anxious to acquire new knowledge, which comes from the curiosity about the new knowledge. This kind of curiosity is regarded as prototype of students' internal motivation. As an individual has his or her own knowledge, as well as his or...