| It has been at least three decades since the research focus of Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) has shifted from the teacher to the learner. More and more studies concentrating on FLL probe into many aspects of the divergence between achieving and underachieving students. Learners' affective factors, such as attitude, motivation, personality, anxiety, empathy and confidence, are given great importance in these studies. One aspect of motivation, academic self-achievement motivation, involves educational researchers in the study of self-concept.Self-concept has been the key research topic in self-study theory since the 1960s. Self-concept refers to one's attitude towards one's skills, ability, appearance and societal acceptance, one's perception of one's own affects and knowledge. In brief, self-concept is one's perception of oneself. Self-concept has an important influence on students – how they feel about themselves and their accomplishments, which in turn affect their persistence in study and educational decisions. Individual's self-concept can be positive or negative. A positive self-concept is valued as a desirable outcome in many educational settings and is frequently posited as a mediating variable that facilitates the attainment of other desired outcomes such as academic achievement. Learners with positive self-concepts perform differently in learning situations from those with negative self-concepts. Negative self-concept in FLL is likely to hinder the improvement of foreign language learning ability. Learners with negative self-concepts are not so confident or so eager to express themselves, and they think they are not capable of learning a foreign language well. General self-concept is divided into two facets: academic self-concept and non-academic self-concept. Academic self-concept is subdivided into subject matter areas, such as verbal self-concept, math self-concept, history self-concept, etc., while non-academic self-concept is subdivided into social, emotional and physical self-concepts, and these can be divided into more specific facets. Educational researchers tend to consider academic self-concepts rather than general self-concepts. The academic self-concept is more helpful for understanding a variety of school-related issues, including educational and occupational aspirations and school achievement. Research studies have transmitted a consistent message that differences in academic performance are associated with those in self-concept level. Research evidence across a range of subject areas clearly shows a strong correlation between self-concept and academic achievement, and the correlation tends to run higher when academic self-concept instead of global/general self-concept is involved. This paper is made up of five parts: Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology, Results and Discussions, and Conclusions. Based on a thorough understanding of self-concept, the writer demonstrates that the general findings concerning self-concept and academic achievement apply to college students' English achievement and their English language learning self-concept (or English self-concept for short). 250 students from GXNU were involved in the study. Their English learning self-concept was measured by a questionnaire, and their English test scores and rating scales were chosen as indicators of their academic achievements. The relationship between the students' English learning self-concept and their English language achievement was analyzed with the help of SPSS 10.0. The statistical analyses indicated that there did exist a positive correlation between them, and the two coefficients were 0.422 and 0.410, both of which indicated that the correlation were significant at the level of 0.01. This correlation between English learning self-concept and English achievement indicates that students' English self-concept and their English learning are reciprocally related, that is, they influence each other. The conclusion can be drawn that the improvement of student's English self-concept can f... |
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