| Since the early 1970 s, the research emphasis upon Second Language Acquisition has shifted from teaching to learning, and more attention has been drawn to explore language learners. There also has been an increasingly academic interest in their beliefs on learning English as second language.My study attempts to define the concept of English learners’ beliefs(ELB) and investigates what kinds of factors have influenced present senior high school students’ beliefs in English learning.To clarify my research, one important factor we need to take into consideration is the nature of language. The necessity of this is that we should make it clear what kinds of attitudes language learners have held towards language itself, which turns out to be very crucial in achieving linguistic proficiency, namely, one’s cognition towards the nature determines his linguistic proficiency.Through questionnaires and interviews, the study finds that the actual performance of students has to some extent deviated from what the New English Curriculum Reform requires, which also inspires the study to further investigate whether and in what aspect the actual learning performance at school conflict with the learners’ beliefs. As a matter of fact, present senior high schools in China have adopted various linguistic methods in teaching English, and certain learning approaches adopted will undoubtedly exert great influence on learners’ beliefs. By dating back to the origin the language learning theories, both their advantages and disadvantages will be reviewed in a deeper manner.The study of the thesis is conducted through the designations of questionnaires and interviews. 200 Candidates are chosen from 4 classes of Shen Yang 4th senior high school. They are the 3rd graders, so they are typical samples in investigating what their learning beliefs bout English are as a second language, and what their affecting factors in learning are. Through the average points of each class, and the interviews with 20 students about each topic, the author will arrive at the final conclusions about the research by contrasting and analyzing the statistics.By investigating and reviewing the author of the thesis observes that within the actual framework of Chinese education, the senior 3rd graders’ notions about the nature of language, their views of learning a second language have been partly undermined, which is apparently influenced by the typical thoughts of question-coping in exams. The author also find that the implementations of the New English Curriculum Reform are not ideally conducted, in that there exist various misconceptions of it; their formation of learning strategies and motivations for learning, affected by the instrumentalism, reveal that they become more eager to deal with questions, rather than to seek solutions to the problem from the perspective of meta-cognition. All their efforts target at exams, and therefore their learning beliefs towards English are entirely tied to NMET.At the last section of the thesis, the author demonstrates his redefinitions of learners’ beliefs in English for the 3rd graders based on the actualities of present education. The fundamental ingredients are as the following:1. To learn a language as it is based upon the nature of it.(The nature of language)2. To obtain the largest volume of academic gains under the background of present actualities.(Second language learning)3. To seeks a high level of self-realization in future studies through an overall development of linguistic competence.(New standards of New English Curriculum Reform)4. To surpass the linguistic barriers in communications and gain an integration of values through exchanges among cultures.(Their beliefs as learners)... |
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