Dynamic Research On English Learning Demotivation Of Non-English Major College Students

Motivation is considered as the most important factor in second or foreign language learning process. During the past several decades, researchers abroad and at home devoted themselves to the field of motivation studies and proposed their own understanding about motivation. On one hand, researchers put their focuses mostly on the positive motivational factors, but they paid less attention to the concept of "demotivation" which refers to the phenomenon that in the language learning process, some specific external forces may reduce or diminish learners’original behavioral intention or an ongoing action. On the other hand, most of the researchers studied motivation from the static perspective in which motivation is treated as a state. However, the strengthening or weakening of the motivation is a dynamic process over the time. It is hard to decide what kind of factors may actually affect the students at one time, and different factors may have different role in affecting the motivation over the time. Therefore, it is worth examining the demotivation from the perspectives of the time.This thesis attempts to use process model to explore the characteristics of demotivation, and try to find different demotives affecting students’motivation in L2learning in different phase, thus providing a framework of how to maintain and stimulate learners’motivation in the L2learning.The research adopted quantitative approaches and try to explain the three research questions proposed in the paper. In order to realize this goal, questionnaires are used to examine the motivation intensity in the three motivational phases and overall demotivational factors affecting students in different phases. The results indicate that motivation intensity is gradually weakened from the pre-actional phase to postactional phase, and students are influenced by different factors in these three phases. Since the subjects all learned English as a foreign language in the middle schools, they have a good foundation of English, as a result, when they entered the high schools and chose Japanese major, they all have a common wish that they will learn both of the languages well, most of them set a goal in English learning. However, their energy and focus is gradually transformed into the language of Japanese. Teachers pay more attention to students’Japanese; the atmosphere is replaced by Japanese learning only; no goal in English lead to low English learning autonomy. Students’English learning motivation is reduced in the actional phase under the influence of the factors mentioned above. In the post-actional phase, although students’motivation is further reduced because of the influence of Japanese, they still have the basic skills of English which can be advanced by re-stimulating their English learning motivation. And the author in the paper proposed some suggestions according to the characteristics of different actional phases.