A Study On The Relationship Of General Empathy And Cross-Cultural Empathy To English Achievements Among Senior High School Students

With the development of humanistic psychology, researchers in language learning filed have paid more and more attention to learners’affective domain since the1970s. Ellis (1997) notes that learners’affective domain is one of the major factors contributing to individual learner differences in foreign language learning proficiency. Empathy, as one of the affective variables, refers to the process of "putting yourself into someone else’s shoes" in common terminology, and is considered to contribute largely to successful language learning. Empathy is closely related to cultural relativity according to Arnold (2000), and then the concept of cross-cultural empathy is presented and has become one important research area in inter-cultural communication studies. However, few empirical research reports can be found on the influence of general empathy and cross-cultural empathy on foreign language learning and their relationship to SLA/FLL, and even fewer are those with senior school students as research subjects. As a result, how and how much general empathy and cross-cultural empathy influence students’target language learning in EFL context is unknown till now. This empirical study is an attempt to fill the research gap in this field.The present study aims to investigate the following three research questions through both questionnaire survey and interviews:1. What is the whole picture of general empathy and cross-cultural empathy like among senior school students in EFL context?2. Are there any significant differences between male and female students in terms of general empathy and cross-cultural empathy?3. Are there any significant correlations of general empathy, cross-cultural empathy and students’English achievements? If there is any, is it positive or negative?Major findings of the present study can be summarized as follows:First, the overall level of empathic ability of senior school students is moderate. Of the four subscales in the IRI, the Empathic Concern scale scores the highest, which indicates that students tend to be sensitive and concern for others, but vulnerable to emotional instability.Second, the overall level of cross-cultural empathy of students in this school is in medium to high level, slightly better than that of their overall empathic ability. Of the four subscales, the Power Distance scale scores the highest, indicating that most of students tend to accept the value of equality in English culture, but they still have some biased attitude towards the religious beliefs in English speaking countries since the Religion scale scores the lowest.Thirdly, there are significant gender differences in the general empathy scale with female students scoring much higher than males, but not in the cross-cultural empathy scale. However, mean scores of female students are slightly higher than that of male students on all the subscales of the CCES.Finally, general empathy and cross-cultural empathy are reported to be significantly correlated. As to their relation to English achievements, results show that there is significant positive correlation between students’general empathy and English achievements, but relatively lower correlation between cross-cultural empathy and English achievements.Based on the findings of the present study, two suggestions and specific methods on how to teach senior school students general empathy and cross-cultural empathy are given in hope of improving students’learning performance in Chinese context. One is to incorporate general empathy and cross-cultural empathy cultivation in language teaching. The other is to incorporate cultural instruction in language teaching, in order to help students gain cultural knowledge about English, to stimulate their learning motivation and to promote their learning achievements.