Motivation To Oral English Development: A Study Of Chinese College English Majors

Learners' oral proficiency of second or foreign language is a subject that drew attention to itself as early as the beginning of the 19th century. Since then, it has become an indispensable part of second and foreign language teaching and learning, research and practice (Richards, 1978; Brumfit & Johnson, 1979).It is universally believed that motivation correlates highly with language achievements (Vandergrift, 2005). The study is to report on a survey of Chinese college English majors' (CEMs') motivation to oral English development with the aim in demonstrating their general motivation, the relationship between the motivation and oral English proficiency and the motivational discrepancies between high- and low-proficiency achievers. Furthermore, it distinguishes the motivational discrepancies between high- and low-proficiency English majors to provide hence practical implications to oral English teaching in China.A total of 160 third-year English majors from College of Foreign Languages at Shaanxi Normal University participated in the study. They were asked to complete a motivational questionnaire consisting of 4 parts (concerning respectively the four motivational factors of oral English development: motivational orientations, desire to oral English development, attitudes towards oral English development and efforts to oral English developement) drawn from Gardner's socio-educational model and his definition of motivation, and based on Vandergrift's (2005) motivational questionnaire, Gardner's Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) (1985) and Tang's questionnaire (2005). In addition, 10 of the participants were interviewed. The data were then collected and then disposed of by SPSS (13.0).Major findings were:(1) Description of Chinese CEMs' General Motivation to Oral English Development: 1) Motivational Orientations: According to statistics, 91.89% of the subjects were motivated to learn oral English, either extrinsically or intrinsically motivated or both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated. And this was corroborated...