【标题】学习者的动机对外语学习的影响 【作者】陈 敏 【关键词】影响；动机；外语学习；教师；学生 【指导老师】王 露 【专业】英语 【正文】. IntroductionIn the process of learning a language, some learners are more successful while others, even given the same opportunity, fail in language learning. This phenomenon confuses educators, so researchers begin to take individual differences to account for some of the variance in the level of proficiency attained by language learners, and the focus has turned from how to teach to how to learn. Researches show that the determining effect on learning results originates from the learner. With the development of modern cognitive psychology, western researchers of foreign language learning have focused their research on the methods of learning. Actually learning is a complex cognitive process, during which the teachers play an external part, while the learners play an internal part. As language teachers, what they can do is to teach students how to learn, and to create a favorable environment of learning for them. In recent years, in the field of foreign language teaching, more emphasis has been put on the research of the learners. Many experts agreed that the learner plays an important role in the process of learning.Language leaning is a rather complex psychological process and a common human cognitive activity as well. The process of language learning is affected by many elements such as motivation, interest, personality and emotion etc. Motivation is an important aspect of affective variables. The initial pioneering experiment by Gardner and Lambert find that foreign language achievement is related not only to language aptitude but also to motivation. Since then, the concept of motivation has become a central focus of a great deal of foreign language acquisition theories, and numerous studies have been carried out to investigate motivation. The results show that motivation plays a primary role in foreign language learning. And many studies have shown that motivation can be an important factor in learning a language successfully. Motivation determines the extent of active, personal involvement in foreign language learning. Conversely, unmotivated students are insufficiently involved and therefore unable to develop their potential foreign language skills. According to Dornyei(1994),“motivation provides the primary impetus to initiate the second language and later the driving force to sustain the long and often tedious learning process.”1 The stronger motivation and the more positive learning attitudes learners have the more effort and more progress they will make.Motivation is extremely important for language learning, and it is crucial to understand what motivations students have and what arouses the motivations. It is also important in a practical sense for the teachers to stimulate students motivations. This paper mainly wants to draw foreign language teachers attention so as to care more about the students learning motivation, and assist them to learn foreign language as well as they can. Literature Review of MotivationMotivation is an integrative component of affective factors of language learners, so scholars have advanced abundant theories of motivation. Although there has been no consensus regarding the definitions and classifications of motivation, all agree that motivation plays a decisive role in language learning. Motivation is a key to learning. In order to have a better understanding of motivation, it is important to clear about some basic knowledge of motivation.A. Definitions of MotivationThe concept of motivation has passed through a number of different interpretations as theories of psychology have changed. The psychologists define“motivation” as the tendency which arouses and maintains the individual to act and leads the action to a certain goal. Brown in his book, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, says that motivation is commonly thought of as an inner drive, impulse, emotion, or desire that drives one to a particular action, or in more technical terms, motivation refers to“the choices people make as to what experiences or goals they will approach or avoid, and the degree of effort they will exert in that respect.”(Keller, 1983)2According to Gardners socio-educational model, Gardner(1985) gives the definition of motivation as“the combination of effort plus desire to achieve the goal of learning the language plus favorable attitudes toward learning the language.”3 So his definition includes three components:(a) effort expended to achieve a goal;(b) a desire to learn the language;(c) satisfaction with the task of learning the language.Ellis(1994) holds that“motivation refers to the effort which learners put into learning a second language as a result of their need or desire to learn it.”4Williams and Burden(2000) define motivation as a state of cognitive and emotional arousal, which leads to conscious decision to act, and which gives rise to a