A Correlational Study Of Learning Motivation, Academic Self-efficacy And EFl Learning Achievements Of Senior-3 Students

As one of the most useful languages of the world, English plays a more and more important role in the globalization process. With the development of economy and society in China, the Chinese people's enthusiasm in learning English becomes stronger and stronger. For Chinese students, English is an important course because it is a major subject in every examination. The factors influencing English learning have been researched a lot, and motivation is considered as one of the most important factors. The theory of self-efficacy, though put forward only in recent decades, is developing rapidly and also is used in education field. However, it is found that the empirical studies are not as many as the theoretical studies of self-efficacy in China. Therefore, in this thesis, these two factors of English learning of senior-3 students are empirically studied specifically and carefully.Learning motivation which can drive students to learn automatically refers to a kind of"personal drive"which can make people have the thought and the goal of doing something, and urge them to give the indispensable efforts to achieve the goal. The theory of self-efficacy is originally put forward by an American psychologist Bandura, and it has been proved by lots of researches that it can influence human beings'thoughts, emotions, motivation and behaviors. Self-efficacy can be employed and studied in many fields, and the same people usually have different self-efficacy levels in different fields, so this research just focuses on academic self-efficacy in the group of senior-3 students. Academic self-efficacy refers to personal belief of their academic ability, by which the learners will evaluate whether they can use their abilities or skills to fulfill certain learning tasks. It contains three dimensions: magnitude, strength, and generality.The researcher of this thesis handed out 350 copies of questionnaires to the senior-3 students, and 298 effective copies were returned and analyzed by SPSS 13.0. The thesis attempts to investigate the general condition of senior-3 students'learning motivation and academic self-efficacy through descriptive statistics, to explore the relationship between them and the relationships between the two variables and English learning achievements through correlation analysis, and to find out whether learning motivation and academic self-efficacy have the forecasting function on English learning achievement. What should be mentioned here is that this study explores respectively the five dimensions of learning motivation, four dimensions of academic self-efficacy and the correlations between them and learning achievements.The major findings of this thesis are as follows:1. Senior-3 students'learning motivation is at a medium level on the whole. Among the five dimensions of learning motivation, the level of learning value which deals with the adaption of society and the social status is the highest. The female senior-3 students have higher learning motivation than the male ones. The arts students have stronger learning motivation than the science students. There is significant learning motivation difference between students of low level achievements and high level achievements, while there is neither significant difference between students of low level achievements and middle level achievements, nor is between middle level achievements and high level achievements.2. Senior-3 students'academic self-efficacy is at the middle level on the whole. Among the four dimensions, the students'confidence in learning English which scores highest of them is at a high level. The female senior-3 students have higher academic self-efficacy than the male ones. There is no significant ASE difference between senior-3 students of literal arts subject and the ones of science subject. There are significant ASE differences between students of low level achievements and middle level achievements, between students of low level achievements and high level achievements, and between students of middle level achievements and high level achievements.3. EFL learning achievements are positively correlated with learning motivation and academic self-efficacy. Among the dimensions of learning motivation and academic self-efficacy, there is a positive correlation between EFL learning achievements and effort level, inward interest, learning situation and learning value, while negative correlation between the achievements and outward requirement. There is a positive correlation between EFL learning achievements and ability sense of finishing English learning tasks, confidence, sense of facing frustrations and ability sense of overcoming the difficulties. Learning motivation and academic self-efficacy are positively correlated with each other. Then, a regression analysis is made to explore whether cause-effect relationships exist and to what extent can learning motivation and academic self-efficacy influence learning achievements. The result is that academic self-efficacy can predict 20.8% of the achievement variance, while learning motivation cannot predict the achievements.According to the result of this research, some suggestions are put forward to the teaching and learning of senior-3 English: the teachers should arouse the students'interest and create comfortable and supportive environment to improve their intrinsic learning motivation; and they should help the students build a proper habit of attribution and make them experience more successful moments of learning English to promote their academic self-efficacy.