The Influence Of Achievement Motivation And Attributional Beliefs On EFL Learning Strategy Use

The rapid technological and social changes challenge the traditional purpose of education; namely, the transmission of knowledge is no longer adequate. Modern language teaching has moved from traditional approaches to various versions of communicative methodology. However, despite this trend and the appearance of a plethora of attractive and authentic language-teaching materials, there has been a growing concern that learners have not progressed as much as might have been anticipated. In response to the methodological issues, applied linguistics aims to discover what is inside the "black box" of the human brain so that teaching methods might be designed to facilitate rather than hinder the learning process. From the 1960s with the advances in the areas of general linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology the research emphasis of second language acquisition began to shift from teaching to learning. Part of this research has focused on "the good language learner" and what strategies they adopt to be successful. Nowadays, quality education in China also aims at producing autonomous learners who not only increase their knowledge and skills but also know how to manage their own learning.A lot of constructive researches have been conducted on the description, classification and function of learning strategies employed by learners in the learning process. Some researchers have tried to prove that training in strategies is the facilitator of learner autonomy. However, learning strategies are not absolutely good for all learners inall contexts; factors affecting strategy use have more or less been neglected. Although there has been an increasing amount of interest in the interrelationship of motivation and strategy use in L2 (Oxford & Nyikos, 1989; Schmid et al. 1996; Okada et al. 1996; Wen, 2001), little has been known about the relationship between strategy use and achievement motivation in FLL context. According to Atkinson (1966), there are two types of motivation-the positive motivation to strive for success and the negative inhibitory tendency to avoid failure. Another variable examined in the study is attribtional beliefs. Attributional beliefs are sort of causal explanations of the outcomes of one's performance, based on Weiner's attributional theory. In educational settings, four basic causes of achievement are postulated: ability, effort, task difficulty and luck. It is proposed that causal attributions are another type of beliefs that affects learners' motivation to select and use effective learning strategies. Anyhow, there exists a shortage of empirical studies on how attributional beliefs influence strategy use in L2 learning.For these reasons mentioned above, the current study has explored the influence of achievement motivation and attributional beliefs on learners' strategy use. The specific purpose is to provide empirical evidence that these two factors may have an effect on the choice of learning strategies and simultaneously, shed some light on the study of learning strategies, strategy training and pedagogy. The subjects involved were 307 third-year non-English majors from six different colleges and universities in six cities ranging from the west to east in China. In this study, an English Learning Questionnaire, which was composed of four parts-Personal Information, Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), Achievement Motivation Scale (AMS) of T.Gjesme & R.Nygaard (1970) and the Multidimensional-Multiattributional Causality Scale (MMCS) (Lefcourt, 1981; Lefcourt, Von Baeyer, Ware & Cox. 1979), was administered to collect information on language learners' individual background, leaning strategies, achievement motivation and attributional beliefs. The statistical analyses employed were descriptive statistics, t-test, product-moment correlation, multivariate analysis of variance and multiple regression. The findings are summarized as follows:In terms of frequency of the use of different categories of learning strategies, compensation and metacognitive...