A Study Of Demotivation In English Learning Of Mongolian Students

Motivation is a crucial factor that determines language learning achievement. Motivation research has been one of the hottest topics in second language acquisition for decades. The existing motivation theories,however, can not explain the whole picture of learning motivation in terms of its counterparts. Only quite recently has the concept of demotivation, the flip side of motivation, caught the attention of researchers and educationalists. Far from being satisfactory, studies and researches directly attending to the notion of demotivation still suffer from a considerable paucity. Besides, few studies are fully devoted to demotivation of senior high school students, not to mention the minority students. English is regarded as a mandatory course for Mongolian high school students and a great deal of students suffers from demotivation. Although some researches have been undertaken to find out demotivating factors affecting senior students, the present study is necessary. For one thing, English is the second foreign language for Mongolian students. For the other thing, they may have different views about English and English community. Furthermore, the reason for English learning may be different. There may be cultural differences in motivation to learn. More specifically, the value placed on education, cultural beliefs about learning and social supports for academic pursuits from family and peers are different from those of Chinese students and parents. Research on the topic may provide suggestions on English teaching and learning of Mongolian high school students.The present study aims to address two research questions: 1) What are the salient demotivating factors for Mongolian high school EFL learners? 2)Is there any gender difference with regard to different demotivating factors?Both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to explore the demotivating factors that affecting student’s English learning. A close-ended questionnaire were distributed to 101 grade two senior students from three intact classes and semi-structured interviews were conducted to five heavily demotivated students and three teachers of English.After Students completed the questionnaires in about 20 minutes, the questionnaires were immediately collected and checked by the researcher. In sum, of 101 participants, altogether 97 valid questionnaires were collected.Interviews with students and teachers were conducted in the following days.To make sure the environment is quiet and comfort, the interviews were carried out in a meeting room. The interviews were conducted in Mongolian and took about 12-15 minutes and then were recorded in a MP3 and transcribed later for future discussion and analysis.The data collected from the questionnaires were fed into the Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS 19.0) for the analyzing needs. First of all,reliability analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were done to verify the quality of demotivation questionnaire. Second, descriptive statistics including mean and standard deviation of the nine factors and each item were employed to find out the demotivating factors and demotivation intensity. Third, principle component analysis was employed in order to reveal the detrimental demotivating factors that affecting student’s English learning achievement. Then, to identify whether there was any significant gender differences in demotivation, independent samples t-test was employed.Two major findings are summarized as follows: firstly, there are six demotivating factors affecting Mongolian EFL learners mostly, which are,from high degree to low, inadequate school facilities, influence of parents or others, compulsory nature of English learning, learner-related variables,attitude of group members and attitude towards English. Teacher-related factors were found in the interview with students and teachers. The resultsare almost in line with Wang’s findings in her MA thesis(2011) except for one factor: attitude of group members. Secondly, Among the nine demotivating factors, gender difference is significant in Attitude of group members,boys got higher scores than girls, suggesting that attitude of group members was a more common source of demotivation among boys than girls. Girls got higher scores than boys only in one demotivating factors,namely the Teacher.The above findings are significant to avoid and minimize demotivation of Mongolian EFL learners. Teachers should make efforts to build rapport with students; give credit and support to them; help students foster intrinsic motivation, proper attribution model; help them promote learner autonomy and effective strategies. Anyhow, this is about collaboration between teacher and students to decrease demotivation and facilitate remotivation.