An Empirical Study On Motivation For English Learning Of Students In Inland Tibetan Classes

With the development of our society, China needs more and more talents. China is a country with a vast territory, where there exists a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Especially in ethnic minority areas, because of the geographic problems and the imbalance of the economic development, the educational level far lags behind other places, which throws us a question that how to improve the quality of the education in poor areas at the same time when we fully carry out develop-the-west strategy. Therefore, the government decided to implement the policy of Inland Tibetan Classes. Excellent graduates from primary schools in Tibet are chosen to get better education in relatively developed provinces and cities. Especially since China entered WTO, the mastery of English has been a necessary ability for people to adapt to our modern society. Meanwhile, English is one of the three main subjects (Chinese, mathematics and English) in schools. Thus, how to promote students'English level should not be neglected. Tibet's special location and culture make the Tibetan students have their own characteristics of studies, which brings their English learning many difficulties.The second language acquisition is often under the influence of many affective factors. It can't be denied that language learning motivation has close relations with second language acquisition, so motivation is always the object of the researches. Gardner and Lambert are the first two persons who worked on motivations. They made great contributions to this field. They classified motivation into integrative and instrumental motivations. Deci and Ryan divided motivation into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. On the basis of these two classifications, a new classification came out, that is internal motivation and external motivation. They have nine subdivisions: interest, sense of competence, self-responsibility, self-perfection, opportunity of improvement, reward/punishment, utility value, group attitude and pressure.The author regards Gao Yihong's (2003) questionnaire as the foundation, then the author devises the questionnaire according to the research aims and Tibetan students'characteristics, choosing Year 2 students from Inland Tibetan classes in Liaoyang No. 1 Middle School as the participants. Ten of them participate in the interview. The author adopts both quantitative and qualitative empirical methods to find out the relationships among English learning motivation, language achievement and gender. The results of the research are as followed: 1. all the nine subdivisions in internal and external motivations exist in the English learning of students in Inland Tibetan classes, and the level of internal motivation is higher than that of external motivation. 2. In internal motivation, self-perfection ranks the first place while in external motivation, the utility value accounts for the most percentage. 3. Students of different gender have different English learning motivations. As a whole, the levels of both internal and external motivations of males are higher than those of females. But two subdivisions males voted are lower than females. They are sense of competence and self-perfection. At last, the author comes up with some strategies to motivate students'English learning.The innovation of the thesis is to adopt the motivational classification that can rarely be seen in previous studies, that is internal motivation and external motivation. It will have reference value for the future researches.