An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Among Motivational Regulation Strategies,Learner Autonomy And English Achievement For Middle School Students

In the process of foreign language learning,learners’ motivation plays a very important role as an emotional driving factor that can guide,stimulate and maintain individual learning behaviors.However,learners face a difficult learning process and their motivation is constantly changing as a result.In this process,learners are affected by internal or external conditions,and their learning motivation may decrease or disappear.Therefore,any purposeful and conscious strategy used to regulate motivation can be a motivational regulation strategy.In addition,learner autonomy has also become a research hotspot of many researchers in recent years.Learner autonomy refers the ability to be responsible for one’s own learning.By reviewing relevant literature,the researcher found that many scholars have conducted a large number of theoretical and empirical studies on English learners’ motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy at home and abroad.However,there are few researches on the correlation between motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy,especially for middle school students,which needs to be further studied.Therefore,this study aims to investigate the use of motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy in the English learning process for middle school students in Yunnan Province,and to explore the relationship among motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy and English achievement.Based on the relevant theories of motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy,this study attempts to answer the following four questions:(1)What is the general situation of English motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy of middle school students?(2)Is there any correlation between English motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy of middle school students and their English achievements?(3)What are the important predictors of motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy which affect the subjects’ English achievements?(4)Are there any significant differences in English motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy in terms of the subjects’ demographic variables,such as gender,ethnic groups,home location and grade?The mixed design method of quantitative and qualitative research was used,740 middle school students in Kunming,Yunnan province was selected as the research subjects,the motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy questionnaires were used to collect the data which were measured by SPSS 25.0 statistical software,and then one-to-one semistructured interviews with 18 students were conducted.Through Descriptive Statistical Analysis,Independent Sample T-Test,Correlation Analysis,Stepwise Regression Analysis and One-Way ANOVA of the collected data,this study found that:(1)The overall use of motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy of middle school students reaches a high level.Among the eight motivational regulation strategies,task value enhancement,performance self-talk and negative-based incentive have higher frequency of use,while mastery of self-talk strategies has the lowest frequency of use.Among the six strategies of learner autonomy,the frequencies of selecting learning strategies,knowing teaching goals and monitoring learning strategies are higher than those of others,while the frequency of monitoring learning process is the lowest.(2)There is a significant positive correlation among motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy and their English achievement of middle school students.(3)Among the eight motivational regulation strategies,performance self-talk and negative-based incentive are the important predictors of English achievement.Selecting learning strategies is the only important predictor of English achievement.(4)In the use of motivational regulation strategies,the mean scores of females are higher than males in the use of the other six strategies except selfreward strategy and task value enhancement.In terms of the use of learner autonomy,females use the knowing teaching goals,setting learning goals and monitoring learning strategies more frequently.However,there is no significant difference between Han and ethnic group in the utilize of motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy.For middle school students from cities and counties,the frequency of use of motivational regulation strategies in the performance self-talk and negative-based incentive is higher than middle school students from towns and villages;In terms of the use of learner autonomy,middle school students from cities and counties perform better in selecting learning strategies,monitoring learning strategies and monitoring learning process.Finally,there are significant differences in the use of motivational regulation strategies and learner autonomy in regard to the grades.Among them,the use frequency of junior middle school students is higher than that of senior high school students.At last,based on the conclusion drawn,some suggestions are raised by the researcher of this thesis on how to improve middle school students’ motivational regulation strategies and how to cultivate students’ learner autonomy for teachers,and discusses the limitations of this study and recommendations for future study,hoping that the future research will be more in-depth and comprehensive as well as contribute to the educational development o f middle school students in Southwest China.