Negative Motivations Of Jiangsu Senior High School Students To Quit English Learning:Against The Background Of China’s New College Entrance Examination

The General High School Curriculum Program and Curriculum Standards for Languages and Other Subjects(2017 Edition),which was released in 2017 by the Ministry of Education of China,allows students to select English as well as Japanese,French,German,Russian,and Spanish on the college entrance exam.As a result,a sizable portion of students have given up on English in favor of other languages.Using the Second Language Motivational Self-System as the theoretical basis and 52 students who selected Japanese as their foreign language subject in a middle school in Yangzhou,Jiangsu Province,this paper investigates the motivations why high school students give up learning English in order to better understand the current status quo of basic English education through video interviews with students and qualitative analysis using Nvivo software to decode-recode the interview content to categorize themes and matrix queries as a case study of motivations for students quitting English learning.Specifically,this paper aims to examine the answers to the following two questions:(1)What is the status quo of Jiangsu middle school students quitting English in College Entrance Examination?(2)What are the negative motivations for the students quitting English learning?(3)What are the possible causes of these negative motivations?The main findings of this study are as follows:(1)For the college entrance examination,it is still rare for current middle school students to choose a different language as their foreign language;at the high school investigated for this study,a total of 55 students made the decision to quit English,accounting for just 2.45%(55/2248)of the school’s total enrollment.With 23 sophomores and 32 seniors,the number of persons who switched languages as a result of the COVID-19 varied.(2)Disgust with the current English learning environment,reluctance to deal with the pressure of learning English,a lack of interest in learning English,the inability to achieve high grades in learning English,cultural distance from English-speaking countries,and a lack of confidence in one’s ability to learn English well are some of the negative factors that drive high school students to quit English learning.In terms of the grade level,all of the aforementioned negative motivations,which are evenly distributed,have a significant impact on sophomores’ English learning;Seniors,on the other hand,concentrated more on instrumental motivations in relation to language learning results,which was impacted by elements including the teacher’s professionalism,the fun and pace of the teacher’s class,and the class size.(3)Based on survey results and interviews,this study discovered that there are various factors in the current situation of English education in high schools that contribute to students’ lack of motivation to learn the language.These factors include large class sizes,a lack of English application scenarios,a lack of phonetic instruction in English resulting in low self-learning capacity,test-oriented teaching methods,a lack of instruction in subject core literacy,and a learning environment that is relatively substandard.