A Case Study On The Causes Of Senior High School Students With Learning Difficulties In English

Underachievement of the English subject in senior high school is a very common phenomenon. Many senior high school students fail to pass English tests and can be categorized as students with learning difficulties in English.According to the discussion in the field of language teaching about the role of individual differences play in affecting language learning, using scales, interviews, etc. as research instruments, this case study is conducted on three senior high school students with learning difficulties as subjects to find out the causes of learning difficulties in English. The research mainly focuses on the subjects'affective factors (motivation, anxiety, inhibition, self-esteem), learning strategies, learning styles (visual and audio styles, tolerance of ambiguity) and their past learning experiences.The hypotheses of the thesis are:1. Affectively, too much or too little anxiety, low self-esteem and high inhibition, weak motivation, especially intrinsic motivation, are the causes of learning difficulties;2. Cognitively, limited use of learning strategies, strong tendencies in audio or visual learning style that doesn't fit learning processes and overly strong or weak tolerance of ambiguity result in learning difficulties in English.3. Negative past learning experiences contribute to English learning difficulties.The results of the study prove the hypotheses. According to the results and the result analysis, the author offers proposals on converting senior high school students with learning difficulties in English and preventing underachievement in senior high school English: affectively, creating favorable classroom atmosphere, enhancing communication between teachers and students, establishing harmonious teacher-student relationship, holding rational attitude towards tests and emphasizing formative assessments; cognitively, devoting efforts into learning strategy training and understanding students'learning styles. What's more, the best way to solve this problem is to detect and early prevent it ever since freshman year.