Networks In Foreign Language Learning Motivation Research

Online foreign language learning (OFLL) has aroused extensive attention and has gradually been recognized in recent years. How to improve its outcome and efficiency becomes an important area of study. Among all the factors that may contribute to online foreign language learning, learner motivation plays a critical role. Today's researches on motivation are generally limited to a socio-psychological perspective or devoted to the typological analysis of motivation and ways of stimulating motivation. Little research has been done to investigate how personal factors influence learner motivation. This inadequacy hinders online teaching research and practice to some extent.This paper, after literature studies of motivation theories and researches, proposes a framework to examine personal factors'effect on learner motivation, highlighting the active role the learners play. The learner factors that are examined in this paper include learners'general foreign language learning (FLL) motivation, computer literacy, attitude toward online learning, and self-directedness. This paper adopts a quantitative method to explore the relationships between various personal factors and their motivation levels. Five instruments are used to answer the research questions: part of Gardner's AMTB used to measure students'motivation of FLL in general learning context, Pintrich's MSLQ used to measure the self-directedness of the surveyed subjects, and other three questionnaires designed by the author used to evaluate learners'attitude toward online learning, computer literacy and OFLL motivation.The author hypothesizes that positive correlations exist between OFLL motivation and the above-mentioned four learner factors. Using the SPSS software for data analysis, this research confirms three hypotheses. Among the four factors, attitude toward online learning is identified as the factor that correlates with OFLL motivation most. Although computer literacy is not found to be highly correlated with OFLL motivation, it is found to be highly correlated with attitude toward online learning, which correlates highly with OFLL motivation. So, when it comes to how to foster learner motivation in OFLL context, computer literacy improvement may well be a good intervention. Besides, self-directedness is also found to be moderately correlated with OFLL motivation. That is to say, learners who are more self-directed tend to be more motivated to participate in online foreign language learning.