A Study On English Learning Interest Of Primary School Students

In 2002, Ministry of Education revised and promulgated The Criteria of New English Course, which requires that students should start to learn English when entering Grade Three in primary schools. The English teaching in elementary school aims at stimulating students'interest in learning English, developing their positive attitude towards learning for the purpose of guiding them to initially build up the confidence of learning English, and helping them to develop their sense of English language and foundation of English pronunciation and intonation. As a result they can initially foster the capability of carrying on the simple daily exchange in English and lay the foundation for their lifelong learning and development.At present, the domestic studies of interest in learning majorly focus on those subjects such as mathematics, physics, while only a few of them on English. In addition, most subjects for the domestic study of learning English interest are middle school and university students. As dealing with the researches abroad, although there are some studies on the learning interest of primary school students, most of them focus on immigrant children.Inspired by the previous researches and the related theories, the present research, by taking the primary school students as the subjects and through interview and questionnaire survey, aims to study the problem of primary school students'interest in learning English. The major purpose of the present research is to find out the changing characteristics and rules of the students' learning interest base on the understanding of their learning status, so that to provides some helpful inspiration and reference for future improving students'interest in learning English. The perspectives for the present research are as follows:(1) whether the students'interest in learning English changes with the increase of grades, if it is, what direction is it toward? Is it towards the positive direction or the passive one? (2) What is the factor that can cause the changes?The research results are presented as follows:(1) Students' English learning interest decreases with the increase of the grades, the fourth grade is the turning period and at that time the learning interest started to decline distinctively. (2) Students'direct interest decreases while indirect interest increases with the increase of grades. (3) Both the objective and subjective factors can influence primary students'English learning interest. The objective factors are the social environment and parents'objective desire; the subjective factor mainly refers to students' fuzzy understanding of English learning value.The thesis consists of five chapters. In Chapter One, the present author displays the background and the structure of the research. Chapter Two is literature view, in which the present author presents the related theoretical bases for the present research, including the definition and classification of interest, the motivation and the psychological features of primary school students. In Chapter Three there shows the research process, including methodology, the aim of the research, the research questions, the subject selection, questionnaire survey and interview, data analysis and the findings of the research. In Chapter Four, according to the above research, the present author puts forward some related methods and strategies of how to maintain students'interest in the process of English learning. Chapter Five serves as the conclusion, dealing with a summary, the limitations of the present research, and the suggestions for future research.