1.1 Background of the Study
It is generally acknowledged that in the process of second language acquisition(SLA), individual differences largely determine a learner’s degree of success. For example,we are confronted with the situation every now and then that being taught by the sameteacher, learners have greatly varied performance and achievement in classroom learning.Among various factors, motivation, a hypothetical concept that we use to explain whypeople think and behave as they do (D rnyei, 2017:1), has been identified as a key factorcausing individual differences in learning.In the past decades, the importance of motivation has drawn increasing attentionamong educational researchers and practitioners. D rnyei (2017:16) believes in thelong-term process of mastering an L2, we need to balance the various internal and externalinfluences among which the motivation is a key player. Nakata (2017:23) holds that“motivation is largely responsible for determining human behaviors and students who arehighly motivated to learn a foreign language will be able to become proficient to a certaindegree regardless of their intelligence or language aptitude”. According to Krashen(1981:102), learners’ motivation level acts as an affective filter on language intake. Toboost learners’ motivation in learning, a plethora of empirical studies have been conductedto uncover the important factors that play important roles in improving learners’motivation in learning or acquiring a second language (D rnyei, 1998; Oxford 1998;Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999).
………….
1.2 Significance and Purpose of the Study
Given the general background provided above, the main purpose of this study is toinvestigate 1) the students’ motivation types in learning English, and 2) correlationsbetween teachers’ teaching method and their learners’ motivation in learning English. Theparticipants (n=216) are from four classes of the fourth graders (10 years old) of a primaryschool in a small city of Shanxi province, which is located in the northeast part ofmainland China. These students are mainly at the beginning level and four teachers areinvolved in this study. Concerning the first question, a motivation questionnaire (seeappendix B) is distributed to the students for investigating their motivational types.Considering these learners’ cognitive level, their English teachers read each question tothem and supervise the process to make sure students understand the meaning of thequestion and make their independent choices. After the questionnaires are collected, allfour teachers and I summarize and record the data together. The second question will bestudied mainly through interview and classroom observation. The interview will reveal theteachers’ teaching beliefs and understanding of the New Curriculum. After brief observingand recording the four English teachers’ classroom teaching (45 minutes for each teacher,based on the same units), I will select two teachers out of the four according to theirteaching methods used (two clearly identifiable and different methods used by them) for further observation. Then their students’ main motivational types will be compared inrelation to their teaching models. Because “sometimes the best motivational interventionis simply to improve the quality of our teaching” (D rnyei, 2017:26), I will draw sometentative conc，英语论文网站，英语毕业论文
|
