A Study Of College English Teachers' Influence On The Art Major Students' Learning Motivation

Motivation is a very important factor in second/foreign language (SL/FL) learning. It has been widely accepted by language teachers and researchers as one of the key aspects influencing the rate and success of SL/FL language learning. Learners with strong motivation are able to learn SL/FL language initiatively and involve themselves actively in the learning process, and they can achieve greater success.Researchers try to explore what factors might cause and influence motivation from different perspectives, including modern psychology, biology, cognitive science, sociology and so on. Despite the awareness of the importance of motivation in applied linguistics, the research about foreign language teachers'influence on students'learning motivation is far from enough. At the very beginning, researchers mainly focused on motivation itself, such as the relationships among learners'motivation, attitude and their achievements. And the subjects were mainly students of language major. The research questions mainly focused on the classification of students'motivation, the description of motivation, and related theoretical model of motivation. As researchers probed more deeply and widely, they started to study the influence of teachers on students'learning motivation. In the middle of 1990s, Tremblay and Gardner'Expanded Motivation Construct, Dornyei's Three-level Motivation Framework and the Motivation Framework by Williams and Burden became the representative theories, with the latter two shedding light on the consideration of FL teachers'influence on learners'motivation. However, little research has been conducted on the motivation of students of some special majors (e.g. art major students). On the basis of the literature review of those researches in motivation, the author of this thesis tries to find out college English teachers'influence on art major students'learning motivation from four aspects:the teachers personal characteristics, teachers "immediacy" behavior, teacher's active motivational socializing behavior, and teacher's classroom management.This research tries to deal with the following three questions:1) Do college English teachers exert an influence on art major students'learning motivation?2) What are the general perceptions of college English teachers'influence on each major, painting, music or P.E.?3) In which aspect, do college English language teachers influence art major students' learning motivation most, the teachers'personal characteristics, teachers''immediacy' behavior, teachers'active motivational behavior or teachers'classroom management?In this study, priority was given to quantitative study as the main approach to get information by a Likert-type 5-point questionnaire. Then Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 13.0) was employed to do statistical analysis of data, including descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, regression analysis and variance analysis test. Meanwhile, to ensure the objectivity of the final results, qualitative study of interviews and observations were also adopted.The results of the study show that college English teachers do exert influences on art major students'learning motivation. Among the four aspects, teachers'"immediacy" behavior has the strongest influence on art major students'motivation, followed by the teachers'active motivational socializing behavior, the teachers'classroom management and the teachers'personal characteristics. At the end of the study, some suggestions on how to improve students learning motivation were proposed.