A Study On English Self-efficacy In The Use Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Self-efficacy refers to beliefs about one's ability to perform any given task or behavior successfully. Students' perceived abilities in English learning or performing English related activities are referred as English self-efficacy. Their self-efficacy exerts significant influence on their learning success and personal qualities. Vocabulary Learning Strategies are specific behaviors, steps, techniques, methods or approaches that students use to facilitate their progress in internalizing, storing, recalling and using the target language vocabulary. In fact, all the students will use some kinds of strategies when they are learning vocabulary. If they seldom employ some efficient learning strategies and sufficient learning skills to help their studies, students cannot get much confidence in English learning. Therefore, both their wills and their skills in language learning are indispensable to students' academic success.This thesis attempts to carry out a research on English self-efficacy and Vocabulary Learning Strategies in the hope of getting significant results, thereby giving implications for teachers in the improvement of students' English performance and personal qualities. All the 100 students are from Dalian University. They are divided into 4 different groups: both English majors and Non-English majors in Grade 1 and 3 respectively. This thesis studies the English self-efficacy and Vocabulary Leaning Strategies use. Meanwhile, it explores the correlations between them. Data from the questionnaire are calculated by SPSS.In accordance with the research purposes, the following findings are obtained:(1) Chinese university students have low self-efficacy beliefs about English learning. Even though most students hold positive views about their capabilities in English learning, they are not so confident in the learning outcomes they produced.(2) The differences between two genders on the sense of general English self-efficacy are not found. However, when narrowing down the attention to the effects of self-efficacy in vocabulary learning specifically, there are significant gender differences.(3) There are similarities and differences between the four different groups in the use of Vocabulary Learning Strategies.(4) Significant and positive correlations are discovered among English self-efficacy and the use on Vocabulary Learning Strategies. All the Metacognitive Strategies, most Cognitive Strategies and Affective strategies are correlated significantly with English self-efficacy. While English self-efficacy has no significant relations with Social strategies.