An Empirical Study On The Relationship Among English Learning Self-efficacy, Learning Motivation And English Learning Achievement Of Non-english Major Postgraduates

Self-efficacy and motivation have always been the research focus among the affective factors which are closely related to English learners. Previous studies mainly concentrate on narrow effects of single affective factor on English learning, without carrying out more comprehensive research. In addition, the majority of the researches are made on middle school students and undergraduates with very few referring to postgraduates. As we all know that postgraduates are an indispensable group of English learning and their English proficiency has great impact on their academic development. Their poor English proficiency should attract people’s attention. The present study combines two motivational variables, self-efficacy and motivation, in order to further explore the reasons and find the solutions correlated with postgraduates’ affective factors.Accordingly, the present study is designed to explore the following questions:1) What is the general picture of English learning self-efficacy and English learning motivation level of postgraduates?2) What’s the relationship among their English learning self-efficacy, English learning motivation and English learning achievement?3) Is there any gender and major difference in their self-efficacy, motivation and ELA?The participants of this study are composed of 166 first-year postgraduates from Jiangnan University. They come from four classes with two different majors(science and arts). Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are employed in the present study. There are two questionnaires, one is English Learning Self-efficacy(Wu, 2002) together with background information of participants and the other is English Learning Motivation(Qin, 2007). The scores of the final exam were collected as a scale of their English learning achievement. The data got from the questionnaires were put into SPSS13.0 for statistical analysis. Qualitative research is a semi-structured interview which was conducted on 20 subjects with high and low level of self-efficacy and motivation respectively, attempting to have a deeper understanding of their self-efficacy and motivation.Research findings are as follows:1) Non-English major postgraduates report medium level of English learning self-efficacy and motivation;2) English achievement is significantly positively correlated to English learning self-efficacy but negatively correlated to English learning motivation in terms of extrinsic motivation.3) Generally speaking, there is no obvious gender difference in self-efficacy, English achievements and extrinsic motivation, but there is significant gender difference in intrinsic motivation. Significant major difference is found in students’ English achievements and motivation but not in English learning self-efficacy. Students majoring in science have relatively higher level of self-efficacy and English achievements than students who major in arts.The present research made a survey of the relationship among English learning self-efficacy, English learning motivation and English achievement. Based on the research findings, the author put forward some suggestions for improving postgraduates’ level of English learning self-efficacy and motivation. The findings are intended to enrich the study on self-efficacy and motivation and provide theoretical and practical importance for English learning and teaching. Furthermore, some more comprehensive researches should be made on self-efficacy and motivation of non-English major postgraduate in order to help them to improve their proficiency in learning English.