A Study On The Demotivating Factors In Senior High School Students’ English Learning

Motivation is one of the crucial factors that influence success of foreign languagelearning, which plays a vital role in influencing students’ participation, self-consciousness,enthusiasm and persistence. 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 schoolstudents and give efficient strategies for overcoming it. Thus, the present study tries to findout the potential sources of demotivation in an attempt to better arouse students’ interest andregain their motivation in the process of English learning.For such reasons, this thesis attempts to explore the existing demotivating factors in HaiXing Middle School students and solutions to the demotivation problem. The researchquestions are:(1) What are the dominant demotivating factors in senior high school Englishlearners?(2) What should teachers and learners do to reduce demotivation in high schoolEnglish learning?Then a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is adopted to find outanswers. The quantitative method is used to collect data of the two questions fromquestionnaires with Descriptive Analysis and Correlation Analysis through EXCEL. And thequalitative statistics generalized from interview transcripts and content analyses providecomplementary illustration for the quantitative statistics.It can be concluded from the study that students’ demotivation is a quite common andserious problem in senior high school English learning. The factors that affect students’learning motivation in English can be classified into three aspects, that is, teacher-relatedfactors, learner-related factors and course-related factors, among which teacher-relatedfactors have the greatest influence, followed by learners and course factors. The result isconsisting with the previous studies.The author provides some suggestions based on the results for both students andteachers. Students need to raise confidence and improve self-learning by using a lot oflearning strategies in their English learning process. Teachers can enrich class activities tomaintain teaching enthusiasm and make a positive classroom environment. Besides, they can also update learning materials. Constructing good English learning environment helpslearners to enhance their intrinsic motivation.