An Investigation Into Junior High School Students' Motivation In English Learning

For foreign language teaching, it is extremely important to study learners'motivation and their efforts to participate in active learning. For students to learn a foreign language, motivation plays a vital role in the success of the study. Foreign language teaching involves learning environment, students'ability of language learning, teachers'teaching styles and teaching level. What's more, it also refers to the learners' emotion factors which contain motivation. It is the key period for Chinese students to learn English in junior middle school. So it has vital significance to study the motivation of junior high school students.Before we know the real language learning motivation of junior school students, we should understand all the complicated intrinsic and extrinsic factors that affect students'language learning and the levels of their influence. In order to find the main motivation and the effective factors in junior school students' language learning, the author carries out an investigation. Questionnaire and interview are designed for the research subjects consisting of 100 junior school students from An Hui province. After making a detailed analysis of the data collected from the questionnaire survey and the interview, the author comes to the following conclusions:(1) Pressure in extrinsic motivation plays more important role than other factors of motivation;(2) All the factors in intrinsic motivation have effects on students'language learning; (3) Depressing classroom environment, stereotyped teaching methods, students'bad emotion and ineffective learning methods are the important causes of junior school students'lack of motivation. Meanwhile, the author points out the limitation of the research and gives suggestions for further researches. It is hoped that these researches can create more effective methods to stimulate students'motivation.