Beliefs, Anxiety, And Motivation In English Language Learning

For a rather long period, the focus of the research on foreign ianguage teaching was on finding the best method to teach and many teaching methods came into being. The language teaching efficiency was so much improved. Gradually, it was realized that teaching methods were only exterior factors, and what to a large extent exerted determinative effect on the learners were their inner factors. Therefore, the focus of the foreign language teaching research shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn" and from studying "teachers" to doing research on "students".Studies about the learners' inner factors were carried out by scholars both at home and abroad. Horwitz was one of the founders of the language learning belief study. In 1980s, she carried out a series of research on language learning beliefs. However, they were all studies in terms of western subjects. In recent years, there were also some studies concerning Chinese college students' language learning beliefs, but most of the studies were done on English majors. The research of anxiety was also the focus of many studies. However, most of the studies stopped at comparing anxiety and English learning achievements, and touched little upon the correlations between anxiety and other inner factors. Language learning motivation was also highly ranked by researchers, but what the researchers cared about was what kinds of learning motivation led to higher learning achievement. There were also many researchers attempted to reveal the complexity of the relation between motivation and learning results, however, the literature on relationship between learning motivation and other learners' factors was very limited, and the participants of those studies were mostly English majors.Under this academic setting, the thesis carried out an empirical study on non-English majors' beliefs, anxiety and motivation in English language learning. On a comprehensive review of previous studies and research gaps on language learning beliefs, anxiety and motivation, the thesis investigated the types of 194 non-English...