A Survey Study On The Relationship Between Motivation And Cooperative Approach In College English Learning

Motivation is one of the most important factors influencing the learner's success or failure in learning a language.However,it is not uncommon for language teachers to find that the motivation for English learning is quite low.The lack of learning motivation is one of the chief factors causing the unsatisfactory situation of college English teaching.Some students often have a feeling that they have not improved much in learning English during their college stage and they complain about their college English teaching,and it is worth of the teachers' special attention to change this situation.This study attempted to examine whether cooperative learning took any positive effects on enhancing college English learners' motivation in China.First,the writer chose 67 freshmen from two classes in Hubei University and offered them a questionnaire to conduct in order to obtain a general picture of the learners' motivation to English learning.Then the cooperative approach was applied to the subjects for ten weeks and different cooperative methods were used in the class.After the ten weeks application of cooperative learning,ten students were chosen randomly from the 67 subjects mentioned above to conduct an interview.They were asked questions about questions essentially linked to the research question.The results of the interview showed that cooperative approach has positive effects on English learners' motivation.The influence can be seen form different points of view.It can increase learners' intrinsic motivation,ensure an optimum level of arousal,raise internal locus of control,make more students to set and achieve their own learning goals with greater interest and supply more informational feedback and support from the teacher as well as from their classmates.It is worth undertaking because it is of both practical and theoretical importance. Practically,it is assumed to provide some practical implications or solutions to some problems in the teaching of college English in China.Theoretically,it may enrich our understanding of how to enhance college English learners' motivation.The study was supposed to make some contributions to the body of existing research and provide some implications to the teaching practice in the future.