Djornyei Theory Of Demotivation

Since the 1950s, researchers and scholars have had great advances on the study related to learning motivation. They have agreed that learning motivation has positive influence on foreign language learning. However, demotivation is a new field in second/foreign language learning. In this part, a detailed literature review on this study will be presented. Firstly, it gives the definition of demotivation. Then, the relevant theoretical basis of the study will be given. Thirdly, this part offers the rich demotivation researches abroad and at home.
Although motivation has been studied for a long time and demotivation is a common phenomenon in language learning process, the concept of “demotivation” has not reached an agreement.
Dörnyei(2001) makes

According to the definition, the subjects were ever motivated but are demotivated.
Attribution, literally speaking, is "cause attribution", which attributes an outcome to a certain cause. Attribution, generally speaking, is seeking for a cause of an outcome. Attribution theory is regarded as a psychological theory about how people explain his or others' behavior and how these interpretations influence their motivations, expectations and following behavior.
The birth of attribution theory should be dated back to last century. F.Heider(1896), an American psychologist, is the first one to put forward the basic principles and ideas of attribution theory. Heider(1958) publishs his work The Psychology of Interpersonal Relation published in 1958, which symbolizes the birth of attribution theory, and is considered as the pioneer in this field of study.
This research is based on the Weiner's(1974) theory. Weiner's theory is also called attribution of success of failure by some psychologists. In his theory, each person is trying to explain his own behavior and analyzes the reasons of the result from three dimension and four factors: ability, effort, task difficult, and luck (See Table

Effort is also an internal factor, but it is unstable and controllable. It means that the more effort, the better students will do in their study. It is decided by students themselves. Task difficulty is a stable, external and uncontrollable factor which is beyond students’ control. Most of time, it is controlled by teachers. In addition, luck is an unstable, external and uncontrollable factor which is decided by environment.This chapter will review the current study on demotivation abroad and at home. The study of demotivation is still relatively few. Moreover, most of the research subjects are non-English majors in college, and senior high school students does not get the researchers’