A Survey Of College Students' Attention In EFL Classroom And The Analysis Of The Related Factors

Over the past two decades, researchers in the field of SLA have become increasingly interested in the concept of attention and its crucial role in so many aspects of SLA theory such as input, processing and so forth.This study is intended to explore the characteristics of college students' attention in English classes and the external factors which affect students' attention in English classes as well as the relationships between attention and learning style, strategy and personality. Besides, another focus of the study is on the question whether students with different genders and disciplines are significantly different in attention.Four questionnaires (ELAQ, SAS, SILL and EPQ) were employed and 212 sophomores in Nanjing Agricultural University were involved in the survey by convenience sampling. The data analyses revealed the results as follows:First, the results showed that 79.1% of the subjects were attentive for most of the English classes but about 20% of them were frequently distracted during the classes. Besides, students tended to be concentrated in the first 20 minutes during a 45-minute class. During a whole day, the morning was the favorable time of classroom attention. Most students (61.8%) were liable to lose their attention when they were seated at the back two rows of the classroom but more attentive when the teacher walked around the classroom. Extracted by the factor analysis were ten principal external factors, which were class atmosphere, class time, teaching content, media, method, textbook, background information and difficult listening answer format, difficult and easy listening content.Second, students' attention showed significant correlations with all subcategories in learning style except for extroverted and introverted styles, including visual, auditory, hands-on, intuitive, concrete-sequential, close-oriented, open-oriented, global and analytic styles. In addition, learning strategy, including six subcategories (memory strategies, cognitive strategies, compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, affective strategies and social strategies), had significant correlation with attention. Furthermore, attention was not correlated with extroversion / introversion in personality, which was proved by the data from both SAS and EPQ.Third, the male and the female differed significantly in attention in English classes. The results in this study showed that the female focused more attention than the male in class. Similarly, students from different disciplines also displayed significantly different attention in English classes. The English majors had greatest attention, arts students ranked the second and science students ranked the last.Based on the results analyzed from the collected data, some suggestions are offered to future researches and teaching implications, such as the internal factors affecting students' attention, the relationships between attention and aptitude, motivation, etc as well as improving English teaching, including adjusting teaching style, method, content, schedule, creating favorable environment, training students' learning strategies and so on.