The Role Of Chinese Values In Motivating College Students' English Learning In China

Motivation is one of the key factors which influence the achievement of foreign language learners, for it determines how committed a foreign language learner is to the learning and how active he or she is in all learning processes. Foreign language teaching (FLT) educators and researchers, both home and abroad, have found many factors that can influence motivation, mainly including the internal ones, such as one's attitude, interest and values etc, and the external ones, such as teaching methodology and the selection of teaching materials etc. Other researches have also been done on certain strategies and approaches about learning motivation based on the career values of college students. However, there are few researches done on the generation of learning motivation from the perspective of Chinese values of college students.This thesis attempts to explore the role of Chinese values in motivating Chinese college students in their learning of English through the investigation of Chinese college students'values and their relatedness to English language learning. Values are the core of culture, which can directly influence cognition, process, results and way of behavior of individuals. Unquestionably, the survey of the values of college students plays an essential role as the economy and the society advance rapidly. On the basis of the exploration of the Chinese college students'values, the thesis puts forward some specific approaches to strengthening English learning motivation which would be of constructive significance in college English teaching.The thesis combines the quantitative method with the qualitative method to investigate the Chinese college students'understanding of and identification with Chinese values, taking 234 non-English majors from 5 universities as subjects. The descriptive analysis given by SPSS 11.5 was employed to deal with the data collected from the questionnaire. Therefore, on the basis of the results of investigation and the experience of working as a college English teacher for many years, the author puts forward five practical and specific teaching methods to highly motivate college students in their learning of English, including design of activities, design of teaching materials, design of vocabulary, design of students'assignments, and the turning of negative values into positive ones.