ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1599531
An investigation into demotivation in English (L2) learning among urban and rural secondary school students
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nanchang Institute of Technology, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, China
- 2Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, China
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The current study intends to investigate demotivation differences in English language learning between urban and rural junior high school students in China, by administering the questionnaires adapted from Sakai and Kikuchi (2009). The results of descriptive, repeated measures and independent t-test analyses showed that: (1) demotivation in English learning was medium-high among all junior high school students, and the order of demotivating factors (from high to low) ranked as learner-related, course-related, teacher-related, and learning-environment; (2) the urban students exhibited a higher level of demotivation than the rural students; (3) however, more specifically, the urban students had a higher level of demotivation in the course-related factors, but a lower level in the teacher-related factors, whereas other factors did not differ. The overall findings provide implications for relevant stakeholders in how to motivate demotivated learners differentially in rural and urban areas.
Keywords: Demotivation, EFL learning, demotivating differences, Urban and rural areas, junior high school students
Received: 25 Mar 2025; Accepted: 05 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tu, Xie and Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhilong Xie, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, China
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