Chinese EFL Learners' Attributional Types

The impact of individual differences on learners' English learning has been emphasized much during the rapid development of the field of second language acquisition research. In this line, attribution theory has been drawing increasing attention. It has been proved that different attributions for failure or success convey different psychological hints to the individual and have different effects on the following behavior. Positive attributions will enhance learning motivation and promote language learning while negative attributions will reduce learning motivation and enthusiasm. Accordingly, how to distinguish positive attributions and negative attributions and help EFL learners change their negative attributions into positive ones have become the research focus.This thesis is an empirical study framed in the attribution theory about English learning and teaching, and aimed to explore Chinese EFL learners' attribution orientation and find out a hierarchy of their attributional types based on the effect on English learning achievement.103 college students (second-year non-English majors) participated in this study. 52 of them formed the Unsuccessful Group (UG) and the other 51 formed the Successful Group (SG). A pretest, a questionnaire-based survey and a posttest were carried out among them. All the other conditions of the subjects were controlled: the same teacher, teaching materials and length of class time. Data were collected from the two tests and the survey, and the statistic analyses of Kendall's W, ANCOVA, correlation, and linear regression were applied to the data.The results showed that the Chinese EFL learners' attributional types were a little different from Weiner's classic description. Meanwhile, the hierarchy for the unsuccessful learners' attributional types, from the most positive to the least positive, was different from that for the successful learners' attributional types. In addition, the learners' English learning achievement could be reliably predicted by their expectancy for future success, indicating that expectancy is a strong underlying psychological force able to account for the effect of attribution upon learners' achievement.These results suggest that it is necessary to train learners to develop more positive attribution for their learning achievement and that the training is best to be based on motivating the learners to generate appropriately high expectancy for success. Thus, the research may have provided a justification and a criterion for attribution training as well.