| As the "dark side" of motivation,demotivation affects students’ learning behaviors and attitudes,resulting in poor learning outcomes,leading to a vicious circle of students’ learning and hindering the learning process.It has attracted researchers since the 1990s.Nowadays,a system of research on foreign language demotivation has been initially developed abroad.In contrast,related research in China started late and flourished in the last 20 years.Most of the research on demotivation in China has been conducted on groups such as university students,English majors,non-English majors and high school students.The group of online learners,on the other hand,has received less attention from researchers.Students therefore have experimented with online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic period.This provides a good opportunity to study the phenomenon of demotivation in English learning among online learners.The purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent high school students were negatively impacted by online-foreign-language demotivation during the pandemic and to try to identify the underlying causes of students’ demotivation and explore the possible coping strategies.The participants were 100 senior high school sophomores and seniors from a private school in Quanzhou because they had both face-to-face school learning and online home learning experience,which made the comparison of learning motivation possible.A combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods was used in this study.First,self-administered questionnaires were distributed to students.Then eight students and four English teachers were randomly selected to participate in semi-structured interviews to gain insight into the reasons for students’ demotivation and the coping strategies they adopted.The author used SPSS to conduct descriptive statistics,factor analysis,and multiple regression analysis on the quantitative data;the qualitative data were organized and transcribed.The study found that demotivation was common among senior high school students in online English learning.Moreover,boys were more likely to suffer from motivation decline than girls;sophomores were more likely to have demotivation than seniors.A total of eight demotivators affected students’ motivation:teacher influence,peer influence,metacognitive strategies,community environment,curriculum arrangement,course format,self-control,and learning attitudes.Students’ strategies for overcoming demotivation were mainly help-seeking,self-regulation,and negative coping,while teachers’ primary means of dealing with students’ online motivation decline were to increase supervision,use verbal reminders,and change themselves.Hopefully,the study might shed some light on addressing more effectively the online English learning demotivation on the part of the language learners and in-service teachers. |
