Research Into Senior High School Students’ English Learning Motivation And Its Implication For English Teaching

As one of the important factors in several affective factors, motivation is closelyrelated to learning effect. A famous American linguist Arnold has once mentioned thatpositive affect and attitude can promote the success in learning, while the success canotherwise improve the development of learner’s affect. According to the theories ofGardner and Lambert, they proposed that motivation is the inner drive of students’study for it helps to encourage students to learn with initiative. Students’ learningeffect can be guaranteed if their motivation is fully stimulated, otherwise theirmotivation will be weakened if they seldom experience improvements in their learning.In other words, motivation promotes the learning effect, while learning effect has aretroaction on learning motivation. However in China, English is a foreign languagewhich lacks a favorable language environment to be learned about. And for mostteachers, they have witnessed a universal problem that students lack interest and theinitiative in learning. Therefore, in the New Curriculum standard, it has claimed thatteachers are required to arouse and reinforce students’ interest so as to transfer theirinterest into stable motivation. From1960s, psycholinguists have focused onresearching the intellectual and non-intellectual factors of foreign language learners. They found that age, learning ability, learning method and learning motivation areshown to be four factors that make difference among foreign language learners.Motivation, as a non-intellectual factor, exerts great importance on foreign languagestudy. English teachers need to help students to motivate themselves in learning andthen improve their learning methods, so as to optimize students’ learning effect to thelargest extent. When paying attention to intellectual factors, teachers might need toattach more importance to learning motivation, adopt effective methods to cultivatestudents’learning interest, so as to stimulate their learning motivation.Based on the questionnaire and interview, this thesis analyzes the types ofmotivation and influencing factors of senior2students in senior high school. With thehelp of experimental teaching, this thesis illustrates the close relationship betweenmotivation and learning effect, proposes several implications for English teachingaccordingly.The thesis is divided into four parts. In the introduction, the thesis demonstratesthe popularity of English learning in China so as to indicate the significance of Englishlearning. Considering the focus of previous studies is more on college students, thisthesis is taking senior high school student’s motivation as the subject. Therefore it is ofgreat significance to choose this topic. Followed by the introduction, the first chapter isabout the previous study of motivation at home and abroad. There is also theintroduction of different types of motivation. The second chapter describes the researchmethod and participants. The target students are senior2students from26thmiddleschool in Nanning, Guangxi. By doing questionnaire, interview and experimentalteaching, it is hopeful to detect and find answers for the research questions. The thirdchapter analyzes the collected data. It gives analysis about the current situation ofstudents’ motivation and the influencing factors by using SPSS. According to the dataanalysis, the fourth chapter gives several implications for English teaching, especiallyfor English vocabulary teaching. There comes the conclusion for the last part whichsummarizes the main content and implications of the thesis.