On Non-English Majors' Attribution Tendencies Of English Learning

There seems to be many problems in ESL for non-English majors in universities. Even though sitting in the same classroom, instructed by the same teacher, students still turn to behave differently: successfully or unsuccessfully. There are many factors which will greatly influence ESL, such as motivations, strategies and so on. Among all the factors, attribution is an important factor which can not be neglected, because the way of attribution will greatly influence people's motivation, emotion and the expectancy for future success.In this thesis, 372 sophomores from History Department and Mathematics Department in Bohai University are divided into two groups according to their learning results of their final examination last year: Successful Group (Group S) and Unsuccessful Group (Group U). The questionnaire is specially designed to test their attribution tendencies of both successes and failures. The research aims to find out: 1) To what reasons do they tend to attribute their successes and failures? 2) What are the differences between successful students'attribution and unsuccessful students'attribution? Therefore, this thesis is going to find out the reasons for unsuccessful students'failure in their English learning.According to the analysis of the results of questionnaires, we find that Group S and Group U attributed successes and failures in different ways. For Group S, they tended to attribute their successes to ability, interest and effort, and attributed failure to lack of effort or bad luck. So we can say that their way of attribution is positive, which will do good to their future learning. In contrast, Group U tended to attribute their failure to lack of ability, task difficulty and lack of interest, and good luck to their occasional success, which is obviously negative.The result of the questionnaire also showed us that students'ways of attribution greatly influence their future behavior and outcome of their learning because their level of motivation are profoundly influenced by their attribution. Therefore, it is our future aim as teachers to find out why unsuccessful students attributed negatively, and try to help them build their confidence and boost their interest, and then make them attribute in a positive way.Another point is that our analysis of result was based on the majority of the subjects, and we took different individuals as a whole. That is to say, we treated those 372 students only as two groups, and in each group, we only paid attention to the majority instead of each individual. We neglected those individual factors and individual differences. In the real teaching, we can not take the result from the larger part as universal. We must pay enough attention to different individuals. What is more, as teachers, we are not the onlookers during attribution process, but the persons to play a very important role in this process, that is to learn to instruct and train students to attribute in a correct way, which will help us improve our teaching proficiency.