Questionnaire Design Of Chinese Senior High Students Learner's Beliefs

In terms of productive research in second language acquisition, language educators have long recognized that learners bring to the language classroom a complex web of attitudes, experiences, expectations, beliefs and learning strategies. Theory and research in metacognitive and pedagogical psychology have indicated the relative importance of learner's beliefs in EFL learning. A typical applied strategy is to complete an inventory of different belief statements, to which learners indicate their degree of agreement or disagreement under the technique of Likert-scale. The most frequently quoted questionnaires at present are Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory by Horwitz in 1987 and the questionnaire designed by Cotterall in 1995, with a few items varying according to different contexts. However, these two questionnaires concerns beliefs about language learning in a general sense, instead of focusing on EFL learning. At the same time, the Chinese students have suffered an inefficiency in English learning, during which their learner's beliefs do conduct a contributive factor.Therefore, to design a questionnaire for Chinese Senior High students has immediate relevance and significance. With a careful comparison and contrast of the two available questionnaires, some items of universal sense remain; on the other hand, some items featuring typical Chinese students'beliefs are brought in. Then 967students from Grade Two in a key senior high school in Northeast China receive the three questionnaires separately and are guided to finish them one by one in class every second day. In order to test this new questionnaire's validity and credibility, a special questionnaire is delivery to every student to collect feedback on their feelings about explicitness, relevance and familiarity of the items on the newly-designed questionnaire. Due to the negative feelings up to 20%, two of the 36 items are deleted. For the rest, the inquiry illustrates highly reliability, especially those items with strong Chinese features, making all the difference.As a pilot study, this questionnaire will be tested with more scientific statistics tools. There is no doubt that with the aid of this questionnaire, a further understanding of the Chinese students learner's beliefs will within reach, which can secure insights into a series of studies aiming at Chinese students'learner's attitudes, styles, behaviors, and strategies.