Influences Of Learned-helplessness On Secondary Vocational School English Teaching And Its Countermeasures

In our teaching we found that learned-helplessness is prevalent in vocational students. Thisphenomenon has serious influences on English teaching. It weakened the students’ intellectualcuriosity and initiative seriously, declined students’ motivation and confidence, and reduced theirlearning efficiency and self-efficacy. Learned- helplessness has strong diffuse adverse effects. Itis not only hazardous to the English learning of students, but also harmful to the learning ofother subjects and may even hinder the comprehensive development of individual students. It isnecessary to explore the adverse influences. To get the countermeasures to eliminate learned-helplessness is the premise to improve the quality and efficiency of our teaching.Learned-helplessness was found by Seligman, an American psychologist. It refers to aperson or an animal who is in a kind of helpless state and feels unconfident or unable to doeverything，because of many times failures. It damaged the motivation, caused cognitive barriers,emotional trauma and other hazards. But Seligman also pointed out that the learned- helplessnessof human can be eliminated after a certain amount of effort.We studied the influences of learned-helplessness on vocational English teaching on thebasis of analyzing the relevant literature, interview surveys and questionnaires. The influencesare mainly manifested in five aspects: emotional helplessness, attribution helplessness, cognitionhelplessness, behavior helplessness and strategy helplessness.We did an intervention experiment and explored some countermeasures: the implement ofemotional teaching can help eliminate the emotional helplessness; guiding students to do theproper attribution can develop student’s self-confidence and reduced the attribution helpless; weintegrated teaching materials and set reasonable goals for students can help eliminate theperceived helplessness; we focused on formative evaluation and kept on mobilizing theenthusiasm of students to help eliminate the behavior helpless; we cultivated learning strategiesability of students to help reduce the strategy helplessness.We analyzed the influences of learned-helplessness and explored the countermeasures so asto eliminate learned-helplessness of students and improve the quality of English teaching.