A Study of Motivation in ActivePerformancein Class

赵 晨

（中国民用航空飞行学院 外国语学院，四川 广汉618307）

Pintrich and Schunk (2002)pointed out that motivation is a desire which stimulates people to think or behave in a certain way.With the help of motivation,people will initiate an action in a positive way and exert him or herself to accomplish a task as ideally as possible.Thus,researchersconnect the research on motivation with the outcome that students obtain and indicated that the more motivation the students have,the better outcome the students will get.The four categories of motivation are “extrinsic motivation”,“social motivation”,“achievement motivation”and “intrinsic motivation”.

Extrinsic motivation refers to the outcome that students achieve.Under extrinsic motivation,there are two subcategories,which are positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement.Positive reinforcement refers to the students’ completion of a task and some positive results.Negative reinforcement stands for the students’endeavour of avoiding negative results,such as blame or punishment,which comes with the inadequate accomplishment or failure.

Social motivation makes students study in order to follow a model they admire or respect,or for the purpose of pleasing somebody which is salient to them.Thus,the learning result is more important to the people the students respect than the students themselves.This motivation can be used as an intrinsic motivation because,if the students try to follow a“modeling” ,the students’ motivation to study will be stimulated by somebody’s production that interests them.

Achievementmotivation meansthatthe studentsfulfilltheir ambitions by challenging and surpassing other students.This motivation customarily introduces high achievement and lead to further and harder learning behaviour.Intrinsic motivation means that interest becomes the main stimulation to the students’learning actions and they learn,not because they are requested to,but because they are eager to solve problems and enjoy the procedure of problem solving.Therefore,intrinsic motivation could lead to the best academic students studying because students initiate their studies through their interest instead of outside imposition.

After the discussion of the identification and classification of motivation,the influence between participation and motivation could be revealed as mutual.To give a further interpretation,on the one hand,interest is the best intrinsic motivation to initiate students’ study action.With the support of intrinsic motivation,students could concentrate on teachers’lecture and perform actively in putting questions forward and giving positive responses to the teachers’ questions (White,1998).On the other hand,in a mutual way,if the topic of a lecture attracts the students’attention,or if the inducements given by a lecturer are effective in stimulating the students’interests,the performance of the students in class would be better than the lecture which is assumed boring or vapid by the students.

［1］Pintrich,P.R.,&Schunk,D.(2002).Motivation in education：Theory,research,and application[M].2nded.New Jersey：Merrill Prentice Hall.

［2］Puchta,H.(1999).Creating a leaning culture to which students want to belong：The application of neuro-linguistic programming to language teaching[C]//J.Arnold (Ed.).Affect in language learning (pp.246-259).Cambridge：Cambridge University Press.