An Investigation Of Demotivation In English Learning Of Rural Middle School Students

In foreign language acquisition, motivation plays a very important part in teaching and learning and influences the degree of effort and outcomes. The new English curriculum puts great emphasis on learning motivation. However, due to various factors, English learning demotivation is prevalent in rural middle schools in China.The purpose of this study is to explore the demotivation in English learning in rural middle schools based on Social Constructivist Model of Learning and the main research focuses on the following fields:1. What are the factors contributing to demotivation in English learning of middle school students in rural areas?2. How can the demotivation in English learning of middle school students be reduced?The guiding theory of this paper is Social Constructivist Model of Learning. In this study, the author divided demotivating factors into 3 kinds, namely language level, learner level and learning situation level based on Dornyei’s framwork of motivation (2001). These three kinds of demotivation were further divided into 30 demotivating factors. Questionnaire survey and interview methods were carried out to investigate the factors and strategies of demotivation. After data collection, the results and discussion were presented by all the 214 valid questionnaires and data from interviews.The results have shown that group-specific factors is the most frequent source contributing to English learning demotivation for rural middle school students. Meanwhile, the students and their English teachers agreed that learning demotivation is mainly influenced by the learner, the teacher and the course. Contrary, the family-related factors are the least factors among six kinds of demotivating factors, which were regarded as the objective reason. All teachers and students thought that the parents paid more attention to English education now than they did in the past, but they could not help students to learn English better because of poor education and economic foundation. Based on the findings, some suggestions for the reduction of demotivation in English learning were provided in terms of classroom atmosphere, students’ self-confidence, teaching materials, relationship between teachers and students and family situation.