Motivation plays an important part in success and failure in learning a second language. “Competition, like other controlling measures, gives students an external locus of causality for their learning. Learning is no longer a task with intrinsic value. It turns into a means to gain positive evaluation and avoid negative evaluation.”(Shui-fong Lam, Pui-shan Yim,. Law & Cheung, 2004: 292) Students feel challengeable, excited and enjoyable to work together to win the competition as intrinsic motivation and are eager to get points or prizes for their own group as extrinsic motivation.

Emotions are also considered as an important factor in language learning success. (Mariza & Martha, 2014: 298-307) Scherer (2005) holds that emotions can also lead to particular motivational behaviors from students: to keep trying to solve a particular learning task, or to stop trying as a result of negative emotions. Where there is interaction there creates emotions. In English class, interaction with the teacher, with group members, with other groups or with their own performing reactions takes up almost all the time of class. Especially in competitive activities, competing with other groups and cooperating with group members are particularly frequent. Students are enthusiastic about competitive activities and they feel enjoyable and challengeable. (Zhou Shengming, 2011: 26)The group members mean much for students and a spirit of teamwork is favorable in competitive activities. (Zhu Wenxin, 2010: 109) The competition generates a better learning atmosphere.

The roles interest, motivation and emotion play in learning and how they function in English learning are closely related to how the competitive activities are designed, organized and carried out. The three factors are essential and should be paid careful attention to.

3. Studies on Competitive Activities in English learning

Researchers have studied competitive activities and showed the advantages of competitive activities in English learning. Appropriate competitive activities can efficiently arouse students’ learning interest, draw out students’ learning initiative, creativity and activeness, and develop their thinking. (Wen Tongsheng, 2007: 31) Competition is a system that is able to maximize potential and activeness of human beings. Competitive activities are a creative application in English teaching. During competitive activities, senses of students’ hearing, sight and kinesthesia are fully stimulated. With great interest, students engage in competitive activities that transform the passive accept into initiative learning. (Zhou Mingsheng, 2011: 26)

Zhu Wenxin (2010) has explored the effects of competitive activities deeply and finds out that competitive activities contribute to improving class learning atmosphere, language output, autonomous learning ability and students’ moral quality. Zhu concludes in the following points: first, compared with non-competitive activities class, students’ English classroom performance and grades are much better. Second, cooperative work in competitive activities leads to a spirit of teamwork and helps students learn better how to participate in classroom activities cooperatively. Third, through competitive activities, students are more active in questioning, helping each other find mistakes and forming a good habit of independent learning.

However, some researches have found the limitation of competitive activities. Shui-fong, Pui-shan, Josephine and Rebecca (2004: 281-296) suggest that “Students became more performance-oriented, more likely to sacrifice learning opportunities for better performance and also prone to have worse self-evaluation after failure”. In plain words, the problem is that once students get a prize for their competition, to ensure winning the prize again, they would play with the simplest version of the game. And with the external reward, sometimes students may become too concerned about their performance. Moreover, when competitive activities do not work well for teaching objectives but only for arousing interest, students may merely take an active part in competition but pay less attention to language input (Liu Jing, 2010: 110). In this study, achievement of language learning objectives is the core and the most important for organizing competitive activities. The form of group competition is a vehicle and an environment to generate good communication, learning atmosphere and cooperative environment.