An Exploratory Study on the Relationship between Demotivation and Academic Fields among Chinese EFL Learners

Abstract

： The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between demotivation and academic fields among Chinese EFL learners. To this end, a 33-item self-made questionnaire was administered to 128 Chinese tertiary EFL students. The collected data were processed by means of both descriptive and inferential analysis. The results identified eight salient demotivators: 1 Introduction As a newly emerged construct, demotivation has been one of the foci in second language acquisition in the past two decades. Previous research mainly centers on the identification of demotivation and demotivators among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners (e.g., Li & Zhou, 2017). These studies have justified the existence of demotivation to learn a second language (L2) and revealed the multiple sources of demotivators (Li, 2014a). The multiple sources are found to be situational and context-specific. However, previous studies mainly focus on the description of demotivators. Little is known about the relationships between demotivation and other factors at contextual, social, and learner levels. To bridge this gap, this exploratory study aims to investigate the relationship between demotivation and academic fields among Chinese EFL learners. To be specific, this study will examine the differences in demotivation to learn English between Chinese tertiary students of English and International Trade. The findings will provide implications for English teachers to reduce the detrimental effect of demotivation in English class and for English language teaching in China and other contexts with similar backgrounds.