A Survey Study On The Demotivating Factors In High School Students’ EFL Learning

Motivation is one crucial factor that influences success of foreign language learning. Researches on motivation regard’motivator’as a kind of’stimulus’, which ignore the significance of the ’dark side’ of motivation, namely, demotivation. Besides, few researches focus on demotivation of the senior high school students and give efficient strategies for overcoming it. Thus, the present study tries to find out the potential sources of demotivation in an attempt to better arouse students’interest and regain their motivation in the process of English learning.For such reasons, this thesis attempts to explore the existing demotivating factors in Yan Cheng No.1Middle School students. The research questions are:(1) To what extent is demotivation a problem in EFL learning among senior high school students?(2) What are the differences between the more motivated and the less motivated (demotivated) students in terms of teacher-related, student-related and course-related demotivating factors?(3) As to the re-motivating strategies, what are the differences between the students who have been demotivated but recovered completely and those students who have not recovered completely?Then a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is adopted to find out answers. The quantitative method is used to collect data of the three questions from questionnaires with Descriptive Analysis and Correlation Analysis through SPSS17.0. And the qualitative statistics generalized from interview transcripts and content analysis provide complementary illustration for the quantitative statistics.The major findings are summarized as follows:(1) Motivation intensity of senior high school students is quite low, and students’ demotivation is a quite common and serious problem in senior high school English learning.(2) Of the three demotivating factors, the teacher-related variables are considered to be the most detrimental factor in high school students’English learning, followed by variables of course and students respectively.(3) Significant differences between the motivated students and the demotivated students concerning the student-related and teacher-related factors.(4) With regard to how to eliminate the negative impacts of demotivators, students who have overcome demotivation tend to focus on their personal duties and responsibilities, while those who haven’t are more likely to emphasize positive changes in external environments, especially re-motivators related to teachers.The present study has two major limitations and calls for improvement in future research. One is that the sample in the study is not large enough and that all the subjects come from the same senior high school. The other is that not all demotivating factors could be included in the questionnaire due to the limitation of research content and participants of the study.