An Empirical Study On The Correlation Among Ethnic Identity,English Learning Attitude And English Achievements Of Dulong Ethnic Junior Middle School Students

For many years,the Dulong ethnic minorities’ development of basic education has been restricted by the complex geographical location and the weak economic and cultural foundation of ethnic areas.Due to the backward economic and educational foundation in Dulongjiang Township,Gongshan County,Nujiang Prefecture,Yunnan Province,the English proficiency of junior middle school students in the Dulong ethnic groups has a significant gap with that of Han students.Learning English well is a great challenge for both students and teachers.There are few studies on the foreign language learning of the Dulong ethnic groups in the literature.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the relationship between ethnic identity,English learning attitude and English achievement of junior middle school students of the Dulong minority,and it is of certain reference significance to foreign language teaching,language policy and language planning in the Dulong ethnic area.In this thesis,153 students of the Dulong Ethnic Junior Middle School in Dulongjiang Township,Gongshan County,Yunnan province were surveyed by empirical quantitative questionnaire investigation as the main method and qualitative interview as the complementary method.The method of convenient sampling was adopted.Among them,78 were male students and 75 were female students.There were 65 students in Grade seven,35 in Grade eight,and 53 in Grade 9.And 10 of them were interviewed by telephone.SPSS.22.0 was used to analyze the data.Descriptive analysis was specifically used to find out the general situation of English learning attitude and ethnic identity of the subjects.Pearson Correlation Coefficient was adopted to examine the correlation between English achievement and English learning attitude and ethnic identity.The Linear Stepwise Regression method was utilized to find out the important attitudinal and identity predictors of English performance.The differences of English learning attitude and ethnic identity between gender and grade were analyzed by Independent Sample T-test and One-Way ANOVA.This thesis mainly discusses the following aspects.Firstly,the paper explores the general situation of English learning attitudes of the Dulong Junior Middle School students towards the Dulong language,Mandarin Chinese and English,and their ethnic identity.Secondly,it analyzes whether the English achievements of ethnic students were related to their English learning attitude and ethnic identity.It also tries to identify important attitudinal and identity predictors of English achievement.Finally,this paper discusses whether there were significant differences between the grade,gender and other demographic variables of the Dulong Ethnic Junior Middle School students in their English learning attitude and ethnic identity.Through the discussion and analysis,this thesis mainly drew the following conclusions: 1.The Dulong Ethnic Middle School students learned the ethnic language at first and attached great importance to their ethnic language.But they thought both Mandarin Chinese and English were very useful,and English sounded pleasant and it had significant social influence.2.The samples’ English achievements were generally poor.In this thesis,there was no significant correlation between English achievement and English learning attitude and ethnic identity.3.The Dulong Ethnic Middle School students in the first grade of junior middle school have a stronger sense of ethnic identity than the students in the third grade.However,there were no significant differences in English learning attitudes in grade or gender.Most of them have a very positive attitude towards English learning.The results of this study have theoretical and practical value for the reform of English teaching in the Dulong district and the improvement of English learning performance of junior middle school students.