| Learning activities are the course of involvements between internal factors of learners (internal cause) and study environment of learners (external cause). Among them, internal factors of learners include intelligence factors and nonintellectual factors, and therefore, the functions of nonintellectual factors on learning achievements are great. But, for a long period of time, the focus on the research of foreign language teaching has been the best teaching approaches and methods. Therefore, a lot of new teaching methods appeared one by one. But the foreign language teaching did not achieve a significant improvement. The reason is that teaching approaches and methods are just outside factors while the keys to English learning efficiency are inside factors of learners to a high degree, namely, intelligence factors and nonintellectual factors. Comparatively speaking, the college students have mastered some basic English knowledge and also more mature in psychology than the students from middle schools. Their levels of intelligence factors are at least above the middle and the differences among them are not big, so the key of the success in English learning of college students lies in nonintellectual factors of college students themselves. Furthermore courses of language learning needs participation of nonintellectual factors more than other courses. So, degrees of concerns from the language teachers will directly produce effects on the learning efficiency of students.The present study starts by reviewing literature on nonintellectual factors abroad and at home, and then tries to find out whether there is still space to be developed in this area. Then, after pointing out the insufficiency in the already-performed research, we explore by adopting qualitative approach: (1) correlations between 7 nonintellectual factors (English learning motivation, learning interest, learning attitude, persistence, learning strategy, exam anxiety, relation between the teacher and student) and college students'English learning achievements in listening, speaking, reading, writing and interpreting and general English achievements respectively, (2) variations in 7 nonintellectual factors between the HG and LG (that is, the high-proficiency group and the low-proficiency group in college English achievements) at two levels: skills levels and general English learning achievement level.This study was conducted mainly through the self-designed questionnaire. The subjects were 440 college sophomores in Jiangxi Normal University. They were recruited from 6 intact classes in 6 departments. With the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS, version 10.0), descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis, and independent t-tests were conducted to verify quantitative findings and /or to provide certain explanations. The results indicate that:1. All the 7 nonintellectual factors (English learning motivation, learning interest, learning attitude, persistence, learning strategy, exam anxiety, relation between the teacher and student) have a certain correlation with their English learning achievements in listening, speaking, reading, writing, interpreting and general English achievements, but there are differences in directions of positive and negative correlation.2. There exist variations in 7 nonintellectual factors by skill level and by general learning achievement level between the HG and LG; all the same, there is a difference: on general learning achievement level, there are variations in all the 7 nonintellectual factors between the HG and LG, but on skill level, there are variations in just several nonintellectual factors among them between the HG and LG.According to the above finds, we believe: nonintellectual factors are the important factors that lead to the diversity of college English achievements, but it varies in effects by different nonintellectual factors on different English skills. Therefore, to improve college English teaching efficacy and quality, teachers, one side, should be aware of the importance of nonintellectual factors; the other side, teachers should also realize that different nonintellectual factors have different effects on learning of different English skills and lay stress on particular nonintellectual factors to improve 5 skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing and interpreting) in English teaching.
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