A Study Of High School Students' Beliefs About Foreign Language Learning

It was in the late 1960s that many researchers in foreign language teaching began to shift their attention from teaching process to learning process and the study of beliefs about language learning is one of them. Linguists of the relevant research strongly suggest that language teachers should assess the various beliefs held by their students and study how such beliefs affect their learning.Based on the experiments carried out by Horwitz (1987; 1988) , Wenden (1987; 1991; 1998), and Wen Qiufang (Wen , 1996), an adapted questionnaire of 26—item concerning language learning beliefs was administered to 84 Chinese students from Grade 3 of the No. 1 High School in Jinan, capital city of Shandong Province. The purpose is to find out common understandings popular among high school students in learning English, and sensitize both teachers and students to the possible influences of these beliefs on foreign language learning.The students were tested in the following five major aspects: their beliefs about the nature of foreign language; their views about the four language skills; the assumptions about teaching as well as learning strategy; and their notions of language learning motivation. The thesis reports and analyzes participants' responses to the questionnaire, summarizing their beliefs in the period of high school English learning. Meanwhile, it attempts to find out different viewpoints held by the high achievers and low achievers in turn. The questionnaire data were processed by SPSS (11.0). Quantitative analysis of the data has generated the following findings:1. In short, most Chinese high school students have already formed some explicit beliefs about English and English learning. Their attitudes towards teaching and learning strategy tend to be positive; meanwhile, they have clear purposes of foreign language learning. Their motivational beliefs such as wanting to perform well in the exam and getting good jobs in future belong to instrumental motivations. But they seem to be more neutral or even negative with the notions about the nature of language. For instance, most of the students stressed the importance of grammar, andvocabulary. They prefer to get adequate exercises for reading and writing, but ignore the balance of four language skill development.2. With respect to the comparison ofthe high and low achievers' beliefs, Independent-samples T test demonstrates the belief variations between the two groups. Significant differences appear in respondents to their preconceptions about teaching and learning strategy as well. The data indicate that the low achievers usually hold less positive assumptions. Mostly, they have the authority-oriented teaching beliefs. Furthermore, they do not have as many managing learning strategies and communicative strategies as the high achievers psychologically, lacking in good plans, self-evaluation and afraid of speaking in the presence of others.In spite of the limitations, for example, the sample group is not big enough and the author did not study the change of participants' beliefs over the three-year language instruction in high school, the survey has yielded some implications for high school English teaching.This study suggests that high school language instructors should start from the observation of learner beliefs in the process of English teaching, emphasizing the positive attitudes of the language teachers as well as those of learners' toward beliefs, fostering the positive elements in their student attitudes towards foreign language learning, thus helping the learning more effectively. In terms of negative or limited views, language teachers can guide learners to give them up step by step through the training of strategy use. Meanwhile, language instructors are responsible for introducing some easy-to-understand knowledge of language nature, creating harmonious language learning environment and boosting students' self-confidence. Hopefully, students' consciousness for being autonomous learners will be aroused by construction of scientific learning beliefs.