A Survey Of Chinese High School Students' Beliefs About English Learning

Since Rubin (1975) first described the common characteristics of good language learners, western language researchers began one after another to explore various factors affecting students' English performance. The study on the students' beliefs about language learning was one of them. As foreign language teachers, we all know that students come to class with many preconceived ideas about language learning, but little is known about the nature of these beliefs or how these beliefs might affect the language learning strategies. Mainly based on Horwitz's study on language learning beliefs and her BALLI (The Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory), the author designed an inventory of 36 items and by using the Likert five-point scale from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree) during class time assessed Chinese high school students' beliefs in five major aspects: foreign language aptitude, the difficulty of language learning, the nature of language learning, learning and communication strategies, and motivations and expectations.This dissertation reports on and investigates the responses of one hundred and five senior middle-school students from the Affiliate Middle-School to Jiangxi Normal University. The data was calculated by the SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) on the computer. The main purpose is to investigate the Chinese high school students' beliefs about English learning, to analyze its findings and to find out the implications for students' learning and teachers' teaching. This study found that: (1) Chinese high school students hold a diversity of beliefs about English learning and ofthe 36 items, more than 30% of the students' responses to 23 items were neutral which indicated that many students' beliefs are not so definite. (2) Chinese high school students' beliefs take on unique characteristics and are influenced heavily by the Chinese culture and environment, which resulted in their preferring to traditional teaching approaches and passive role in the English classroom. (3) an enjoyable change has taken place on the student's beliefs about English learning, for example, the students are more confident about their foreign language aptitude; their choice of learning strategies are more flexible; the students no longer only emphasize memorization, recitation, repetition and practice, their attention now is being paid more and more on the function and communication of the language, and some of them seem to show a tendency of stronger integrative motivation. (4) the students in this study tended to have stronger instrumental motivation than integrative motivation and their achievement motivation is especially weak. These findings told us that: (1) language teachers should try to foster positive beliefs that lead to effective learning strategy use and minimize negative beliefs that inhibit learning and teachers can remove students' misconceptions by providing knowledge or illustrations concerning the nature and process of second language acquisition. (2) it is necessary to reform the learning and teaching methods, the curriculum, the teaching means, the syllabus and policy of examination in order to catch up with the pace of the students' development and their improvement. (3) students' time should be fully utilized and their activities should be arranged or organized properly. (4) the effect of culture in language teaching and learning should be paid full attention to. (5) English teachers in middle schools need to be conscious of and sensitive to the opinions and expectations of the student's. Teachers and educators should rethink their attitudes and assessment system towards the students' success and their failure as a result of student's weakachievement motivation. (6) the BALLI is a useful tool for initial identification of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' beliefs about English learning and a discussion stimulus at the onset of EFL classes to help students develop more effective learning strategies, much further research is required in this area, for example, the relationship between students and teachers, students and adults, students in different levels, students in different schools, and their changes.