A Study On The Relationship Between Students' Motivation And Their Preferred Pedagogical Activities

Based on relevant literature, this thesis aims to investigate the relationship between art university students'English learning motivation and their preferred pedagogical activities. It attempts to address the following research questions: (1) What motivations do art university students have in learning English; (2) What kinds of pedagogical activities do art university students prefer; (3) How do students'motivations correlate with their preferences for pedagogical activities?A questionnaire and an interview are designed in the present study. The main contents investigated are motivation types, motivation intensity and pedagogical activities. Altogether 173 students from art university respond to the questionnaire and 10 of them are randomly selected for the interview.With the help of Descriptive Statistics, Factor Analysis and Pearson Correlation Analysis, the major findings are summarized as follows: (1) Six factors of students'motivation are found. They are language interest motivation, going abroad motivation, individual development motivation, learning situation motivation, social pressure motivation and performance motivation. Students'individual motivation which belongs to instrumental motivation is the strongest of all while their language interest motivation is rather weak. It indicates that art university students are mainly instrumentally motivated in English learning. (2) Art university students'English learning motivation intensity is not very strong in general. This is reflected from the research findings that they do not spend much time on English learning in spare time and they seldom take part in English extracurricular activities such as English corners and speech contests. Meanwhile, most of the students lack the ability of autonomous learning. (3) Four activity factors are analyzed. They are structural activities, cultural activities, teacher-dominated activities and cooperative activities. Students have a favor for cultural activities, which include English games, English songs, English movies and other culture-related activities. They do not like structural activities which are activities such as grammar exercises, dictation, reading, reciting and so on. (4) Correlations between student's motivation types and their preferred pedagogical activities are found. Language interest motivation is positively correlated with structural activities, cultural activities and cooperative activities. Going abroad motivation and individual development motivation are found to be positively correlated with cultural activities. Learning situation motivation has positive correlation with teacher-dominated activities and cooperative activities. Social pressure motivation has positive correlation with structural activities and teacher-dominated activities. And performance motivation has positive correlation with structural activities.According to the findings and literature review, the thesis puts forward some suggestions for English teaching in art university as follows: (1) Teachers should make great efforts to promote students'intrinsic motivation according to their learning motivational need; (2) Teachers should foster students'autonomous learning as far as possible; and (3) In the respect of teaching design, teachers should use flexible ways, have a clear aim and carry out appropriate classroom activities.