A Study Of Teachers’ Influence On Students Learning Motivation

Motivation, as one of the most important factors influencing foreign language learning, receives great attention from researchers at home and abroad. These researchers have investigated motivation from the aspect of behaviorism, cognitive linguistics and sociology, but sill few concerns foreign teachers’ influence on students’ learning motivation, especially on the relationship among the three aspects of teachers---teachers’ personal characteristics, teachers’ instructional behavior and teachers’interpersonal behavior.Therefore, this thesis tries to study foreign language teachers’ impact on students’ learning motivation and to make clear which aspect exerts the greatest impact on learning motivation. The subjects of the study are120English majors of which90are females and30are males from Jiangxi Normal University. A questionnaire is carried out to collect data and then Statistical Package for Social Sciences (17.0) is adopted to analyze data, including descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and One-Way ANOVA test.The findings of the study show that teachers’ instructional behavior exerts the greatest impact on students’ learning motivation, and teachers’ personal characteristics have the second strongest influence while teachers’ interpersonal behavior the least. In details, among the teachers’ instructional behavior, teachers’ expectancy and modeling plays the most important role. Besides, teachers’ English proficiency, their attitudes towards students and teachers’ feedback also have a positive impact on stimulating students’ learning motivation. As to teachers’ interpersonal behaviors, some of them are found indispensable for the inspiration of learning motivation, such as eye contact, smile and body language.It’s also found that there are correlations between teachers’ influence on learning motivation and the gender of students. The finding shows that teachers’ instruction behaviors and personal characteristics are more influential on females than on males. However, males in Normal universities are more inclined to be affected by teachers’ interpersonal behaviors than females.In a word, the thesis tries to examine the relationship between teachers’ influence and students’ learning motivation. At the same time, the thesis puts up with concrete teaching suggestions which can effectively help foreign teachers improve teaching skills and their instructional behaviors, in the hope of increasing students’ learning motivation and arousing students’ interest.