A Comparative Study Of Senior High School Students Onenglish Learning Demotivation In An Ethnic Area

It is a usual situation that students’ English learning motivationis diminishing,and some students even lost their interest in it. Many scholars have paid their attention to the positive perspective of motivation, while the negative side of motivation still remains an open issue. In fact, demotivation is prevalent in language classes. Therefore, it is of significance to do some research on demotivation which may benefit both language learning and teaching.This study aims to find out if there exist differences on English learning demotivation between Han students and Ethnic minority students,and if there are differences in terms of English learning demotivation among students from different grades in an ethnic area. A combination of quantitative method and qualitative method is adopted to search for answers. The quantitative method is used to collect data from questionnaire investigation conducted among 280 senior high school students. Independent-Sample T-test and Descriptive Analysis were done using SPSS 17.0. The qualitative study in the form of interviews provided a complementary illustration to the quantitative part.The study shows that demotivation is a prevalent phenomenon in this senior high school. In the comparative study between Han students and ethinic minority students,there is no significant difference on the teacher-related factor. However, significant difference exist in terms of “social environment-related factor”, “learner-related factor” and “learning environment-related factor”. Significant differencesare also shown when comparing students from Senior One, Senior Two and Senior Three.Compared with the students in Senior Two, the students in Senior One incline to attribute their English learning demotivation to their teachers;the differences on “teacher-related factor”, “social environment-related factor” and “learners-related factor” is significant between Senior One students and Senior Three students; No significant difference is found on “teacher-related factor” between Senior Two students and Senior Three students.The present study has two limitations. One is that the samples in this study is not enough, another is that the applicability of the questionnaire should be improved, and not all the demotivating factors are included in the questionnaire due to the limitation of the research contents and the participants of the study.