Researching The Effects Of Motivational Strategies Used In Junior High School English Classrooms On Students’ Achievements

Motivation is one of the most important affective factors affecting the success of foreign language learning. Its role is to stimulate the desire and drive of learning a foreign language and to provide sustainable motivation for the process of further learning.The English classroom is the main place from which students obtain English knowledge,and the teachers’ use of teaching strategies which stimulate students’ learning motivation in the classroom is seen as an important factor to arouse students’ foreign language learning motivation. However, under the exam-oriented educational system, students have become machines for learning knowledge, while teachers have become machines for teaching knowledge. Usually, teachers just blindly instill knowledge into students,ignoring students’ real needs and interests. They fail to fully stimulate and sustain students’ learning motivation, and this leads to the lack of students’ learning interest and the falling of learning efficiency.Through an analysis of the data collected via the questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews of 104 students from Class 14 and Class 24 of Grade Seven in Changshu Experimental Middle School and a 3-month teaching experiment, this study answered the following two research questions:1. What are the differences between students’ perceptions of motivational strategies in English classrooms and the frequencies of these strategies being used by teachers?2. To what extent can teachers’ use of motivational strategies affect students’ achievements in English?The research findings are summarized as follows:1. All the students agreed that the 40 motivational strategies can stimulate their English learning motivation effectively. But there is a big difference in the teachers’ use of various strategies. Strategies related to behavior of teachers, classroom atmosphere and teacher-student relationship, confidence and effort attribution have higher consistency in students’ perceptions and teachers’ use frequencies. The students think that the strategies related to interest and culture are important in stimulating their learning motivation but teachers use them insufficiently. The strategy related to language usefulness is thought not to be very important by students but used often by teachers.2. The three-month teaching experiment results show that the five intervention strategies teachers used for arousing students’ learning motivation have significant effect on students’ English achievements. The five intervention strategies have significant effect on both boys and girls in their achievements, but have different effects on students of different learning levels. The five intervention strategies have a certain effect on both students of high level group and those of middle level group, and the effect on students of middle level group is more significant, but they have no obvious influence on the students of low level group.Based on the discussions of the results and findings, some tentative suggestions were put forward for English teaching: Teachers should elaborately design team activities and be directly involved in group activities in order to motivate the students’ learning through the cooperative learning group. They should hierarchically set learning goals according to students’ actual learning level so that students are able to experience the joys of successes from time to time. Meanwhile, to ensure the effectiveness of the strategies for arousing motivation, it is necessary to choose different strategies on the basis of the differences of students and adjust the strategies timely according to the students’ reactions. Helping students to understand the culture can not only effectively promote the students’ interest in learning English, but also help students improve theirability of language use. In addition to test scores, teachers should adopt a variety of other forms of incentives, so that students can obtain fun from English learning which is not exam-oriented and which is free from the pressure of the senior high school entrance examination. Finally, based on the success of stimulating students’ learning motivation,teachers must pay attention to protecting and maintaining the motivation of students so as to internalize it into a long-term and healthy state of mind.