The Impact Of Well-administered Verbal Praise On Self-regulation And Self-efficacy Of Chinese College Students In English Study

In 1977, Bandura proposed a very individually-oriented concept "self-efficacy", which has great influence in the field of Education. In language teaching, if students' self-efficacy of language learning is enhanced, the willingness to approach and persist on language tasks and the ability of problem-solving in those tasks will be promoted with positive emotional experience and reduced fear and anxiety. Its significance lies in its long-running effect. This paper explores to find a point of exertion to apply intervention - verbal praise - in order to enhance students' self-efficacy under the guidance of Bandura's Self-efficacy Theory. With an experiment, it tries to reveal how self-regulation, self-efficacy and behavior of language learning interplay with one another on first-year college students with the external intervention ?praise. The attempt of the experiment is to find a specific way of intervention upon students' self-efficacy at a specific level to raise the self-efficacy for language learning at a relatively general level in order to improve their performance in examinations in language study.The result of the experiment substantially supports the hypotheses of the paper. Although the improvement of the time does not lead to the improvement of the performance in the examination, this may be mainly due to the short duration; it significantly leads, however, to more active meta-cognitive strategy use; with this the students are quite probably able to make greater improvement in performance in the future; they can also produce a more accurate judgment of their self-efficacy for language learning; this judgment has proved to be a good predictor of their performance. Thus, it gives guidance to the practical teaching approaches on intervention to enhance students' self-efficacy and paves way to future research in this area.