On English Learning Motivation Of Middle School Students Willing To Study Abroad

Learning motivation is one of the most important factors that affect foreign language learning and has always been an important research area in psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and second language acquisition. Since Gardner put forward learning motivation in the1950s, the research on learning motivation has made a lot of progress abroad. In recent years, the domestic research on learning motivation also develops quickly. However, in studies on foreign language motivation, the college students are often chosen as the subjects in China, with few studies being focused on middle school students, especially middle school students willing to study abroad. The present study is aimed at filling this research gap in the area. The participants of this study are Chinese middle school students to study abroad and the experiment is designed to examine their learning motivation types and the correlations between their motivation and their pragmatic competence development. It is hoped that the findings of the present study can provide some implications to pedagogy and future research.In the present study,100middle school students to study abroad are selected as the subjects, including50males and50females. In order to make contrast,100domestic middle school students who do not have the plan to study abroad are also selected with the same gender proportion. The instruments of the present study are the questionnaires adopted from the relevant previous studies. There are three research questions in the present study:1) Are there any differences in the type of learning motivation between the middle school students to study abroad and the domestic middle school students?2) Are there any differences in types of learning motivation between male and female middle school students to study abroad?3) Are there any correlations between leaning motivation of the middle school students willing to study abroad and their pragmatic competence development? To what extent does the learning motivation benefit the pragmatic competence development? To answer these questions, two surveys were done in the present study and the collected data were put in the computer for analysis with the help of SPSS17.0.Through the analysis of the data, the present study has the following findings:1) Compared to the domestic middle school students, the middle school students to study abroad have better performance in several motivation types.2) The differences between male and female middle school students to study abroad are significant in three learning motivation types.3) The pragmatic competence of the middle school students to study abroad is higher than that of the domestic middle school students. Four learning motivation types of middle school students to study abroad have obvious positive effects on improving the middle school students’ pragmatic competence.The results of the present study contribute to the motivation research of Chinese students and foreign language teaching from the following three aspects. Firstly, this study yields insight into the motivation situation of the middle school students to study abroad which expand the research subjects in this field. Secondly, this study makes a probe to the relationship between motivation types and pragmatic competence development of the middle school students to study abroad. Thirdly, the findings of this study give some pedagogical implications to second language teaching, especially for training middle school students to study abroad.