An Investigation Into Demotivation Of Rural Junior Middle School Low Achievers In EFL Learning

Learning motivation is one of the important affective factors that affect the effectiveness of foreign language learning.Scholars at home and abroad have achieved fruitful results over conducting in-depth research on this issue.While most scholars discussed the positive influence of foreign language motivation,the research on demotivation that negatively impact the students' learning behavior needs to be expanded.Based on the particularity of rural English teaching environment and students' mental state,it is of great practical significance to explore the demotivating factors of EFL learning of rural junior low achievers.This paper adopts both questionnaires and interviews to collect data,taking 628 students in two rural middle schools in Jiangxi Province as the research participants.It aims to address the following research questions:(1)What's the general situation of the present rural middle school demotivation in EFL learning? Then 198 junior low achievers were selected from the first data as the subjects to answer:(2)What are demotivating factors in English class for rural junior low achievers?(3)What are the main predictors of rural junior low achievers' demotivation on English learning? Two questionnaires were adopted to collect data to answer the above questions: the first questionnaire was from Gardner(1985)to answer the first research question and the second one with modifications was based on Sakai & Kikuchi's(2009)to address the second and third research questions.Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six demotivated low achievers and two English teachers to discuss the demotivating factors deeply.SPSS 17.0 was used to analyze the data with descriptive statistics,factor analysis and regression analysis.The findings are as follows:(1)The intensity of the students' English learning motivation in rural junior middle schools is relatively low.Only 4%of the students are in motivated condition,50.6% of them are in the intermediate level and 45.4% of them are in demotivated situation;(2)Five demotivating factors were extracted: “Family's Economic Status and Attitude toward English;Teacher's Teaching Style;Learners' Intrinsic Motivation and Learning Conditions;Teachers' Personality;Inadequate School Facilities”;(3)Among the five demotivating factors,“Learners' Intrinsic Motivation and Learning Conditions;Family's Economic Statusand Attitude toward English and Teachers' Personality” were considered to be the three most significant predictors that lead to rural junior low achievers' demotivation in EFL learning.Most rural low achievers are from left-behind families mostly,and the absence of parental emotional care and slack attitude toward the students' learning have a more profound impact on students' English learning demotivation than the poor family economic status.Meanwhile,the rural English teacher's negative personality(e.g.lax,perfunctory and irresponsible etc.)poses greater risk on students' demotivation on English learning than the professional knowledge level and teaching ability.The implications for rural English teachers are:(1)Helping the students set self-concordant goals and proximal subgoals;(2)Balancing the explicit challenges and existing skills;(3)Keeping regular positive attentions and progress checks to the students' sub-goals;(4)Arranging group tasks and give positive feedback.