Abstract

English plays increasingly crucial role in society and the tendency of learners are younger and younger. While owing to the lack of environment, English is hard for the young to acquire it. Moreover, quality- oriented teaching are advocated wildly by increasingly scholars and teachers. “Duck-stuffing” and high pressure type of teaching are no longer suitable for learners, more humanistic methods have been raised to stimulate and maintain individual’s confidence, interests and motivation of leaning. How to encourage students to learn independently and willingly has been the heated topic to be discussed. What is more, taking pupils’ certain psychological and perception characteristics into consideration, their attention can only sustain for a short time. At that time, maintaining their attention and interests in classes is emergency. Teachers try to borrow the idea from second language acquisition (SLA) to make the teaching more efficient. Especially, rewards are used as routine in English classes, which is an efficient way to catch students’ attention and stimulate their interests. However, rewards-giving as an extrinsic motivation has its shortage that too much rewards-giving may distract learners attention and ruin their intrinsic motivation. The research intends to observe the English classes by collecting the data from the observed class, interviewing teachers and making surveys to pupils to make clear the relation between the various rewards, pupils’ behaviors and the results(the grades). During the research, the rewards-giving types, moments and frequency were paid attention to. The results of rewards-giving methods in English classes partly from the analysis from the correlation between the rewards-giving frequency and pupils’ grades and partly from whether pupils’ intrinsic motivations were ruined or not.

Key words: English class’ rewards; intrinsic motivation; learners’ perception and psychological characteristics; SLA

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Background of the study-1

1.2 Research questions-1

1.3 The significance of the study-1

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 Learning Motivation-2

2.2 Classification of rewards and its function-2

2.3 English learning theories-3

2.4 Pupils’ perception and psychological characteristics-4

3. Research Methods-5

3.1 Research subjects-5

3.2 Research instrument-5

3.3 Research procedural-5

4. Findings and Discussions-6

4.1 The Interview and Teachers’ Observation Part-6

4.2 The Results of Questionnaire and Pupils’ Observation Part-7

4.3 The Results of Data Analyzing-8

5. Conclusions-10

References-11

Appendix-12