A Study On Senior High School Students’ EFL Learning Motivation On Basis Of Gender Differences

Motivation is one of the most important individual differences in the process ofsecond or foreign language learning, and also it is a key factor influencing the successor failure of the learning. Therefore, research on motivation has become an importanttopic in second language acquisition.Based on D rnyei’s L2Motivational Self System (L2MSS), which is the latest L2motivation theory, the author carried out the study with gender as a key variable. Theaim of the research is to explore the situation of senior high school students’ L2MSSand the gender differences. Specifically, taking387senior high school students in ChenZhou, Hunan Province as participants, the present study is to explore the followingresearch questions:1) What is the general situation of students’ English motivational self system inChinese senior high school?2) Are there any differences among the three components of L2MSS betweenmale and female students?3) Which component is the best predictor of students’ motivated learning behavior?Are there any differences between male and female students?The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative methods. The questionnaireused by Taguchi et al. in China was administered among387senior high schoolstudents in Chen Zhou, Hunan Province. All the data collected were entered intoSPSS.19to conduct analysis. Descriptive statistical analysis was used to describe thesituation of senior high school students’ L2MSS; independent sample t-test was adoptedto examine the differences between male and female students’ L2MSS; and multipleregression analysis was applied to explore which component predicts students’motivated learning behavior best.6male students and6female students participated inthe semi-structure interview, and the content of the interview served as the supplementfor the quantitative research.Major findings of the present study are as the followings:1) senior high schoolstudents in China possess relatively high level of L2MSS and motivated learningbehavior. Among the three scales, language learning experience is the highest, followedby the ideal L2self, and the lowest is the ought-to L2self;2) female students possesssignificantly higher language learning experience and the ideal L2self than male students, but their ought-to selves have no notable differences;3) the best predictor formotivated learning behavior in senior high school students is language learningexperience, followed by the ideal L2self. The ought-to L2self has impact on malestudents’ motivated learning behavior, but it does not make a difference in that offemale students. The current study made a detailed discussion about the above resultsand gave some implications for English teaching in senior high school.