Developing English Low-Achievers' Non-Intellectual Factors By Keeping Study Diaries

With the rapid development of our nation, there emerges an increasing demand for well-educated and highly professional people. Thus education has become one of the significant parts in both the rise of our nation and our life and work.With the popularity of 9-year compulsory education, many students will continue to receive further education in high schools as well as in colleges or universities. Generally, people between 5 and 24 years of age gain knowledge in schools as students. In the accelerating globalization and the increasing communication between countries, the English language has become an international language helping people in different parts of the world with their communication, hence becoming the most important foreign language widely learned in China. In China's developed areas especially the eastern coastal regions, English is studied in the early childhood of some children. As Chinese students study English as a foreign language without a native language environment, they will inevitably meet with difficulties during the course of study.Low-achievers in English learning are those who have great difficulty in learning English well and they are unable to improve their English by merely depending on themselves. For teachers, how to help these students learn English is a problem that should be taken into careful consideration. The truth is that students' learning abilities and individual situations differ greatly from each other. Therefore, it is imperative that teachers guide and assist students to conduct effective English studies on the basis of their individual conditions.There are many factors contributing to students' learning disabilities. This dissertation is aimed at exploring how to develop students' non-intellectual factors in learning by improving a habit—keeping a study diary. Based on researches, some educators have discovered that not all these students perform poorly in their studies because of their low intelligence.The fact is that a large number of these slow-learners lack some proper study habits and methods, which eventually lead to their learning difficulties. Those bad habits, if not corrected in time, will result in a series of unsatisfactory performances, including lacking sufficient interest in English study, losing self-confidence and having lower grades. Researches at home and abroad reveal that students' non-intellectual factors, which contribute significantly to the full use of one's intellectual capacities, can be personally cultivated and developed. In this sense, whether non-intellectual factors can be fully developed plays a key role in one's study.The experiment in this study is conducted among 790 senior 2 students in a four-star high school, with a focus on 56 students from 5 different class types who learn other subjects well yet are especially weak at English. Based on previous research findings both in China and internationally and in combination with relevant theories in teaching and education, this experiment is intended to seek effective solutions to English learning disabilities by means of keeping study diaries. Information is collected with the help of questionnaires, conversation, observation, comparison and so on. According to the research and analyses, there are more and more slow-learners and it is necessary to adopt more effective ways to help them.Not all these difficult students are slow-minded or not smart, instead, some of them are fairly clever and they do well in other subjects. Apart from their original weakness in English, they fall behind mainly due to bad study habits and insufficient knowledge accumulation. Repeated failures without successful experiences cause them to lose interest in English gradually, which in return affects the development of their non-intellectual factors.The experiment shows that these students can make much progress by improving a study habit—keeping a detailed and regular study diary. Once they achieve good marks in tests by means of a good study habit, they are likely to experience great joy of success, which will eventually help them to fully develop their non-intellectual factors. In this way, they are certain to do better in exams and greatly improve their English language competence. By consolidating what they have achieved through their hard work and teachers' encouragement, they will be able to study effectively and reap increasing fruition in their English study.