A Correlation Study Of Psychological Reactance And English Achievement Of Middle School Students

Since Stephen Krashen first proposed the Affective Filter Hypothesis in the1970s,2a considerable amount of research has been done to test his claims. Besides attitude, motivation, anxiety, empathy and self-confidence, especially for middle school students, PR is also taken as an unfavorable affection in the English learning. The purpose of this thesis is to extend the recent study on negative psychological factors that influence second language acquisition of middle school students by providing empirical evidence to prove that PR influences SLA unfavorably. Affective Filter Hypothesis, theories on psychological reactance (PR), Self-differentiation and the Mediation theory were employed in this thesis.By using qualitative and quantitative methods involving questionnaire, interview and statistical analysis, this study investigates the correlationship between PR and English achievements. Subjects including150randomly selected grade seven students from Nanhu Middle School in Wuhan. In the analysis, English achievement is manifested by uniform examination. Descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, independent sample t-test and linear regression analysis of the collected data were conducted by using SPSS17.0.Analyses indicate that:1) psychological reactance in English learning is a common phenomenon in middle school students and there’s significant negative correlation between students’ psychological reactance and their English achievements;2) gender difference does not contribute to the influence that PR has on English achievement.3) Autonomy-restricted reactance, peer influence and over-required reactance are the three most important reasons causing reactance. Findings of this study support treating reactance as a latent variable comprised of unfavorable cognitions in language learning.According to the findings of the present study, pedagogical implications and suggestions are provided, such as fully playing teacher’s role as a mediator, making use of positive affect of PR, developing affective teaching skills and paying more attention to peer influence. The ultimate goal is to improve English learning achievement.