A Study On The Effect Of Task Difficulty On Junior High School Students’ Self-efficacy In English Learning

In this study,130 students from a middle school in Shuozhou City were chosen to investigate whether the change of task difficulty would cause the short-term change of self-efficacy in the process of English reading comprehension test.The first study examined whether junior high school students’ English self-efficacy changed with task(reading comprehension)difficulty,and whether different initial self-efficacy had significant interaction effect with task difficulty.The results showed that the subjects with the initial self-efficacy at the middle level had a significant increase in self-efficacy after accepting the easy task and a significant decrease in self-efficacy after accepting the difficult task.At the same time,it was found that no matter what difficulty the subjects with low initial self-efficacy accepted,their self-efficacy increased;no matter what difficulty the subjects with high initial self-efficacy accepted,their self-efficacy decreased significantly.The subjects with high and low initial self-efficacy showed a regression mean phenomenon after performing tasks.In Study 2,subjects with moderate initial self-efficacy in Study 1were continuously tracked and measured to explore whether their self-efficacy was still affected by task difficulty after three months,that is,with the passage of time,whether their self-efficacy would return to the initial state before task execution.The results showed that after three months,the self-efficacy of the subjects with medium initial self-efficacy was no longer affected by task difficulty but returned to the initial level,which proved that in the middle school students with mediumself-efficacy,the change of self-efficacy caused by task difficulty was short-lived.Finally,according to the results of the study,educational suggestions are put forward from school education and family education.