A Study On The Relationship Of English Majors' Self-Efficacy, Learning Attribution And Achievement

Learning causal attribution theory and self-efficacy theory are the main theories to explain the English achievement for English majors, which have been paid more and more attention in Second Language Acquisition in recent years. Scholars both at home and abroad have conducted many empirical researches on these two theories respectively,and a few researchers have already devoted to the study on the relationship of these two factors. Through the quantitative research method and the qualitative research method, this research aims to examine the characteristics of college English majors'success and failure attributions,self-efficacy , and the relationships among these two factors and English achievement of English majors. Firstly the writer investigated sixty college English majors in Grade Three with two questionnaires, concerning attribution and self-efficacy, and then ten subjects were interviewed. This research attempts to explore the answers to the following questions: (1) what are the features of English majors'causal attribution and self-efficacy? (2) Are there any differences in students'failure and success attributions among groups at different English proficiency levels? (3) Are there any differences in students'self-efficacy among groups at different English proficiency levels? (4) What are the relations among students'failure and success attributions, self-efficacy and academic achievement?After the analysis of the questionnaires, the study shows that:(1)College English majors tend to attribute both success and failure to internal factors, effort and ability, groups of high and low language proficiency levels do not have any substantial differences in attribution.(2)College English majors have low general self-efficacy in English learning. The high-achievement and low-achievement groups differ from each other in self-efficacy in a significant degree. (3)In successful situation,ability attribution correlates with self-efficacy positively at a significant level, while luck and context attribution correlate with self-efficacy negatively at a significant level;in unsuccessful situation,the correlation coefficient between ability attribution and self-efficacy is significantly negative. (4) Self-efficacy and academic achievement correlate with each other significantly in a positive way.While the attribution correlate with academic achievement,but not significantly. And the following findings from the interview generally support the above results.Based on the research findings, some pedagogical implications are presented. It is suggested that teachers should heed the college English majors'non-intelligent factors, in particular focus on cultivating the interest in learning; provide positive guidance of attribution to the students and take effective ways to improve their learning efficacy. The adoption of reasonable verbal feedback and relaxing strategies will make them more confident in their learning. Moreover, although there are limitations in this research, recommendations for further researches are presented in the end..