Chinese EFL Learner's Perceptions Of Self-efficacy And Achievement In English

Self-efficacy, defined as the personal beliefs about one's capabilities to organize and implement actions necessary to attain designated levels of performance (Bandura, 1986), is found to mediate skilled performance, especially language development (see Pajares, Schunk, Shell and their associates). This thesis reports on a study investigating the relationships between self-efficacy perceptions and English achievements with Chinese EFL learners at both the secondary and tertiary levels.The researcher developed a 56-item questionnaire based on 7 types of self-efficacy beliefs emerging from a comprehensive review of previous studies and her own pilot study. This questionnaire was administered to a total of 516 subjects from two middle schools and a university participated in the study. The results showed that Chinese-speaking learners of English generally exhibited high self-efficacy beliefs in learning English. However, generalized self-efficacy perceptions, like the global self-concept, declined with an increase in learning experience; whereas specific self-efficacy perceptions developed in tandem with language skills.Correlational analyses revealed that generalized self-efficacy perceptions did not predict English achievements so well as specific self-efficacy perceptions at both the secondary and tertiary levels. In particular, output self-efficacy was a good predictor for English achievements across all groups. Regression analyses indicated that the reading self-efficacy accounted for much variance in English achievements at the secondary level. So did the listening self-efficacy at the tertiary level. The results also showed that high achievers were distinguished from low achievers more by specific self-efficacy perceptions than by generalized self-efficacy perceptions. The perceived self-efficacies for high-achievers generally exhibited an M-shaped pattern while low-achievers followed aW-shaped pattern in self-efficacy development.Overall, the results confirmed the effect of specificity of self-efficacy beliefs and the corresponding relationships between self-efficacy beliefs and achievements, and lent support to some researchers' view that generalized perceptions of self-efficacy transcend different tasks and domains.