A Study Of Demotivating Factors In Senior High School Students EFL Learning

There is a long history of the study of L2 learning motivation. A lot of researches abroad and at home have shown that motivation is a key factor in successful language learning. Students with strong motivation can always achieve greater success. However, it is not difficult to find that some students'English learning motivation is gradually decreased or even lost during their learning. In the case of senior high school English learners, they might be demotivated because of the difficulty of the grammar rules they find in their studies or low scores they get in the test. Therefore, failure in foreign language learning becomes a salient phenomenon, and it is supposed that demotivation might be one of the factors that accounts for it. Despite the probable importance of demotivation-solving in learning general, and L2 and EFL in particular, not much research has been conducted on it. This study intends to explore the demotivating factors in senior high school English learners and the solutions to student demotivation problem. The research questions are:(1) What are the salient demotivating factors in Chinese senior high school English learners? (2) What should teachers and learners do to reduce demotivation in high school English learning? In order to base the research on a factual foundation, a research experiment is to be made in this essay, which includes a questionnaire survey and an interview. The subjects of the questionnaire are 99 third year senior high school students from a general senior high school in Shenzhen City. A 34 item-close-ended questionnaire is used to examine the subjects to get overall understanding of demotivation problem and an interview of 22 demotivated students is held to get more specific information. The conclusion will show that, on the contrary to previous studies, teachers related factors are not the most powerful demotivation factor compared to noncommunicative methods and learning contents and materials.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter one is the introduction to the present study, including the background, purpose, and significance of this study. Chapter two is the literature review concerning about the general theoretical background and the previous researches on motivation, foreign language learning motivation and demotivation researches both at home and abroad.Chapter three describes the research design including the research questions, data collection instruments, data collection procedures and data analysis methods. The questionnaires and the interviews are both used in the present research to make a detailed inquiry on the demotivating factors of senior high school English learners.Chapter four presents the findings of the investigation and the discussion.The last chapter is the conclusions which include a brief summary of the findings. implications for teachers and students to overcome demotivation, the limitations of the present study and suggestions for the further research.