Associations between Chinese Language classroom environments and students’ motivation to learn the language

Associations between the nature of Chinese Language Classroom Environments and Singapore secondary school students’ motivation to learn the Chinese Language were investigated. A sample of 1,460 secondary three (grade 9) students from 50 express stream (above average academic ability) classes in Singapore government secondary schools was involved in the study. The perceptual measure approach was used to investigate the nature of Chinese Language classroom learning environment. A well-validated classroom environment instrument, the Chinese Language Classroom Environment Inventory (CLCEI) (Chua, Wong, & Chen, 2006; Chua, 2004) was used to investigate teachers’ and students’ perceptions towards their Chinese Language classroom learning environments in six dimensions, namely ‘Student Cohesiveness’, ‘Teacher Support’, ‘Involvement’, ‘Cooperation’, ‘Task Orientation’ and ‘Equity’. Students’ motivation to learn the Chinese Language was examined using the Chinese Language Motivation Scale (CLMOTS) (Soh, 1993). Two statistical procedures, simple correlational analysis and multiple regression analysis, were used to examine the relationships between students’ motivation to learn the Chinese Language and the nature of their Chinese Language classroom learning environments. The results from the simple correlational analysis indicated that students’ motivation to learn Chinese Language was found positively correlated with all the six learning environment dimensions under investigation. However, the results from the multiple regression analysis indicated that students’ motivation to learn Chinese Language were associated with only three dimensions of the learning environments, ‘Teacher Support’, ‘Involvement’ and ‘Task Orientation’, where the ‘Task Orientation’ dimension having the most significant association with students’ motivation to learn Chinese Language. The findings are consistent with many previous studies on motivation that academically motivated students are usually those students who are task-orientated (Gardner, 2001; Stipek, 1993).