The Influence Of Self-attribution On The Non-English Major Students' Autonomous Learning

With the development of the society and economy, how to learn English well has become a hot issue. Therefore, the aim of the College English Teaching should be: to foster the students'ability of the autonomy of English language using and learning, thus developing their lifelong English learning skills. And this just meets the Requirement for College English Teaching issued by China's Ministry of Education (2003) ---lifelong learning skills and learner autonomy. Based on this point, this thesis mainly researches on the non-English major students'autonomous learning ability from the perspective of attribution."Autonomous learning", this concept stemmed from the debates of the development of lifelong learning skills and the development of the independent thinkers in1960s. From then on, autonomous learning has been being a hot issue in learning and teaching of modern education. Henri Holec firstly introduced the concept of"autonomy"to the foreign language teaching in 1981. Among these more than three decades, a number of psycholinguistic experts have defined the autonomous learning from different perspectives. And the author of this thesis prefers the Zimmerman's.Zimmerman, the representative of the autonomous learning of the social cognitive school, employs the"self-regulated learning"rather than"autonomous learning". For him, self-regulation refers to the degree that the students metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally are active participants in their own learning. (Zimmerman, 1986) The students only in this learning phenomenon can be the full or entire autonomy.Attribution, generally speaking, is the process of attributing, in which the results and outcomes or the other's action are analyzed. Weiner's attribution theory, motivation---emotion attribution theory, is mainly about achievement, and it has been widely used in education. In the school environment, the student, consciously or unconsciously, find the causes or attributes the outcomes of a text or an exam, especially the failure of a text or an exam. Johnson K (1999) claims"motivation and attribution are regarded as the two major affective variables"in language learning.This study, mainly based on the Zimmerman's theoretic framework and Weiner's attribution theory, explores the effects of attribution beliefs on the use of five categories of autonomous learning and the learning behavior in Xingtai University. The subjects of the present study are 148 sophomores major in the departments of Chinese, geography, and mathematics from Xingtai University. This survey consists of two questionnaires to investigate the students on the use of autonomous learning and attribution beliefs. The non-English major students'use of autonomous learning questionnaire is composed of three parts---personal information, self-regulated learning skills rating scale for college students (SLSRCS) by Xie Jiashu, and the multidimensional-multiattributional causality Scale (MMCS) (Lefcourt, 1981; Lefcourt, Von Baeyer, Ware & Cox, 1979). The statistical analyses applied are descriptive statistics, one-way ANVON, t-test, product-moment correlation, multiple regression and path analysis. The results of this study indicate that attribution beliefs do affect the use of the five categories of autonomous learning; moreover, different achievement attributions have different influences on the autonomous learning behaviors.On the main findings stemmed from this study, the pedagogical implications for the College English language teaching are as follows: it can be through the learning strategies training to foster the students'autonomous learning ability; help the students to shape the positive or adaptive attribution beliefs, and then strengthen the students'ability of autonomous learning through the combination of the attribution training and the use of autonomous learning training.