Exploring Senior High School Students' English Learning Demotivation in Mainland China.

Lixiang Gao,Honggang Liu,Xiaoxi Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.822276

Abstract

In the last 20 years, much attention has been paid to learners’ demotivation. Researchers have conducted many studies on second/foreign language learning demotivation from the perspectives of social culture, social psychology, and so forth. In China, related studies have mainly focused on college students’ demotivation; scant attention has been paid to senior high school students. Regarding scale development, although much progress has been made, there remains a need for a scale with high reliability and validity that is suitable for students in the basic education stage. Therefore, based on previous studies and choosing Chinese senior high school students as participants, this research study developed a scale with 55 items, and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to develop a 28-item scale with six dimensions. The six-dimensional construct encompasses teacher knowledge, important others, teacher responsibility, learner-related factors, learning contents, and critical incidents, which are the key factors leading to English learners’ demotivation. Among them, the factor of critical incidents is new and has been overlooked by other researchers. Moreover, the descriptive analysis demonstrated the degree to which the demotivators influence learners, and the independent samples t-test found a significant difference in the impact of critical incidents in terms of the students’ language proficiency. Ultimately, four suggestions are put forward to remotivate and sustain learners’ motivation.

Highlights

IntroductionThere has been increasing interest in demotivation over the past 20 years
To explore the dimensionality of the English learning demotivators and the factor structure of the constructs included in the English Learning Demotivators Scale (ELDS), and to reduce the number of items, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed using SPSS 26.0 software
Factor 1 consists of teaching contents and teaching strategies, which can be subsumed under pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), the integration of subject knowledge and teaching knowledge (Shulman, 1987)

Summary

Introduction

There has been increasing interest in demotivation over the past 20 years. After Dörnyei (2001) investigated the definition of second language (L2) learning demotivation for the first time, more and more researchers have paid close attention to L2 learning demotivation (e.g., Falout and Maruyama, 2004; Kikuchi, 2009; Karaca and Inan, 2020). From the perspective of the cognitive approach and social psychology, researchers have expanded on the factors that negatively influence L2 learners’ motivation, that is, the demotivators (Falout et al, 2009; Kim, 2011; Xaypanya et al, 2017). Senior high school students are expected to realize the significance of learning English fully and correctly and have “intense learning motivation”

Methods

Results

Conclusion