The Effects Of Internal Motivational Factors On The Motivational Behavior Of Middle School Students In Foreign Language Learning

It is generally believed that motivation is a key factor to successful language learning, and this has been supported by abundant research on second language acquisition. However, the internal structure of motivation, and the roles these internal factors play in motivational behavior need further research. On the basis of previous research findings and relevant literature, it is hypothesized that all the internal motivation factors have direct effects on motivation and some of them also have indirect effects on it. This study is designed to obtain an overall picture of the fourth-year junior high school students' motivation and the effects these factors have on their motivation. The study also provides some evidence in this area, and aims to present some implications for English teaching and learning in Chinese context.The participants are 200 fourth-year junior high school students studying in a junior high school. The questionnaire was originally designed by Qin Xiaoqing (2007), but some items are changed and added in order to make it appropriate to the particular situation and meet the purpose of the present research. There are altogether eighty-eight items in this questionnaire. Descriptive statistics is conducted to study the present situation of junior high school students' motivation. Correlation analysis and LISREL are used to explore the direct and indirect predictive power of internal factors on motivation and the correlations among these internal factors. Independent-samples t-tests are employed to explore the similarities and the differences of learning motivation between different types of students in terms of learning achievement and gender.The major findings of the present study are summarized as follows. Firstly, all factors have direct effects on motivation, but only mastery goals, long-term goals, interest, self-efficacy, anxiety and valence have indirect effects on motivation. Anxiety is found to have negative effects on motivation. Interest has the greatest total effect on motivation, followed by self-efficacy, valence, mastery goals, long-term goals, causal attribution, anxiety, short-term goal, attitude and performance goal. This research also reveals the complex interrelationships between various motivational variables. As the strongest predictor, interest not only influences motivation in a direct way, but also enhances motivation indirectly through influencing valence, self-efficacy and goal-setting. Among the two subdivisions of interest, situational interest is found to play a more important role than personal interest.Secondly, significant differences are found between high-achievers and low-achievers in all the variables except in attitude, anxiety and attribution of failure. High-achievers score higher than low-achievers in all the factors except attitude and anxiety, which suggests high-achievers are more motivated and are more willing to engage in learning activities. Between males and females, only mastery goals, valence and long-term goal exhibit significant differences. Of all the variables, females score higher than males except attitude, suggesting that females have stronger motivation and are more involved in learning English.On the one hand, the findings of the present study are consistent with the findings of the previous studies and confirm the hypothesis. On the other hand, the present research reveals the differences among different age groups. Compared with the former studies performed by Qin Xiaoqing (2007) and Lu Min (2008), this study finds that the fourth year junior high school students have less positive learning attitude, lower level of anxiety, and that their attitude is not significantly correlated with motivation. Meanwhile, no significant differences are found between females and males in terms of all internal motivational factors, except in valence and mastery goals. These results further imply the complexity of learning motivation.Results of the present study revel that the fourth-year junior high school students generally have a low degree of motivation. Based on these findings, implications for inspiring motivation in teaching have been discussed in that paper.