An Empirical Research On Junior Secondary School Students' L2 Motivational Self System And Their English Proficiency

Since the 1950 s,language learning motivation,as one of the important factors affecting second language acquisition,has been paid more attention by many researchers at home and abroad.Among them,"integrative motivation" and " instrumental motivation" proposed by Gardner and Lambert(1972)are the main ones.However,Gardner's "integrative motivation" was continuously questioned,so Dornyei put forward a brand-new motivation framework in2005,namely L2 Motivational Self System(L2MSS)on the basis of combining the tradition of this school and drawing on the achievements of the sociocultural school.Since it was put forward,many foreign scholars have carried out a lot of researches on this theory and obtained some empirical results(Csizer,Kormos 2009;Ryan 2009;Taguchi et al.2009),but this theory still needs to be verified in different cultural backgrounds.Based on the above analyses,this paper takes 182 junior high school students from an ordinary middle school in Changchun as the research subjects to further explore the second language motivational self system theory.The research questions are: 1.What is the junior high school students' L2 motivational self system ? 2.Is there any difference in junior high school students' L2 motivational self system in grade? If exist,what is the difference? 3.What is the relationship between L2 motivational self system and proficiency?Through the questionnaire survey,supplemented by interviews,the research results found that: 1.L2 MSS plays a good role in junior high school students,with an average of 4.19(4 is a basic agreement).Among them,Second Language Learning Experience has the greatest impact.2.The results of One-factor Analysis of Variance Between Groups show that there is a significant difference between different grades in L2 MSS.The scores of Grade Seven and Grade Eight are significantly higher than that of Grade Nine,with MD=0.62,MD=0.57 respectively.However,there is no significant difference between Grade Seven and Grade Eight in L2 MSS.3.Pearson r Correlation Analysis results show that there is a significant relationship between Grade Seven English proficiency and Ideal L2 Self(ILS)and L2 Learning Experience(LLE)(r=0.329**,p<0.05;r=0.357**,p<0.05),but it has no obvious correlation with Ought-to L2 Self(OLS).There is a significant correlation between Grade Eight English proficiency and L2 Learning Experience(LLE).(r=0.368**,p<0.05)There is no significant correlation between Grade Nine English proficiency and Ideal L2 Self(ILS)and L2 Learning Experience(LLE).(r=0.260*,p<0.05;r=0.292*,p<0.05)According to the research findings,the following teaching suggestions are put forward: 1.Teachers should try their best to improve students' English learning interests so that studentshave a richer sense of satisfaction in English learning;2.Teachers should try their best to cultivate students' learning self-confidence,so that students are able to believe themselves as well as believe that they have the ability to learn English well;3.Teachers should cultivate students' active L2 self,introduce more examples that are close to students' real life,and let students know that the teacher's teachings are beneficial to them.