A Study Of Demotivating Factors In Junior High School Students’ EFL Learning

Researchers at home and abroad have made comprehensive studies on L2 learning motivation. They mainly study on the classification and stimulation of L2 learning motivation, scant attention has been paid to the other side of motivation-demotvation. However, demotivation is an obvious phenomenon in the foreign language education environment.The study on demotivation began in the 1990s. With college students and senior high school students as research subjects in most researches, researchers pay scant attention to junior high school students. As to demotivating factors, previous studies almost attribute students’demotivation to the following three factors, namely teachers, learners and learning environment, while ignoring the variables of social environment. With regard to factors related to individual differences, there are no empirical study on demotivating factors perceived by male students and female students in junior high school. Besides, researchers mainly investigate the demotivating factors perceived by students in their English learning and pay little to the demotivating factors perceived by teachers in students’ English learning. This situation has stimulated the author’s interest to make a further investigation on the seldom touched areas in this field.The questions addressed in the current study include:1. What are the factors that demotivate junior high school students in the English study?2. Are there any differences in demotivating factors between male students’ and female students’ perception?3. Are there any differences in demotivating factors between teachers’ and students’ perception?Data are collected through a questionnaire survey and processed by means of SPSS. The subjects involved in the study were 696 students from two junior high schools in Yicheng County, Linfen City, Shanxi Province and 40 teachers from four different junior high schools in the county. The main findings are as follows:1. There are many demotivating factors perceived by students in their English study. Consistent with the previous studies, teacher-related factors such as traditional teaching method, inappropriate classroom behavior, poor pronunciation are the primary demotivating factors in students’ opinions. Besides, learning environment-related factors, such as inactive class environment, boring course books and deficiency in teaching devices as well as learner-related factors such as failure experiences in English learning, lack of confidence, insufficient in the application of learning strategy, low interest, negative attitude towards English are also perceived as demotivating factors by students in the English study.2. Male students and female students show differences on their perception of demotivating factors. On the whole, compared with female students, male students regard learning-environment related factors and learner-related factors as more demotivating to their English learning. Besides, the two groups also have significant different opinions on some of the specific demotivating factors and male students think they are more demotivating to their study, such as insufficient in the application of learning strategy, negative attitude towards English, difficult texts in the course books, the negative influence of their parents and peers, and so on.3. Students and teachers are different in their perception of demotivating factors. In general, they are more willing to attribute the causes for demotivation to each other. Besides, there are also some specific demotivating factors that are of significant differences between the two groups. Compared with students, teachers regard learner-related factors such as failure learning experiences, low interest, lack of confidence, insufficient in the practice and application of learning strategy as more demotivating to students’English learning. While students think teacher-related factors such as traditional teaching method, the lack of interaction between teachers and students, poor pronunciation and learning-environment related factors such as boring course books and inactive classroom atmosphere are more demotivating to their English learning.