A Study On The Correlations Between Individual Differences And High School Students’ English Achievements

In recent years, as the focus of teaching researches has shifted to the "subject" in teaching activities—learner, students’ individual differences arouse foreign language teaching researchers’ interest and attention. In high school English teaching, teachers often find that under the same teaching environment, students’ learning achievements vary enormously and sometimes even polarize. One of the key causes for this phenomenon is students’ individual differences. On the basis of the research results about individual differences in the fields of education psychology, applied linguistics and especially SLA, the thesis made a review of the research status of individual differences at home and abroad and discussed their definitions, causes and classifications. Some individual differences can be adjusted while some are unadjustable. For the purpose of facilitating high school English teaching, it has more practical significance to make a study on those adjustable factors. The thesis made an enquiry into the most influential adjustable individual differences in high school students’ English learning and studied their correlations with students’ English learning achievements by means of quantitative analysis, so as to provide theoretical bases and practical suggestions for effective individualized English teaching in high school. The research in the thesis consists of two parts. First, results of a group interview with high school English teachers about the major adjustable individual differences indicates that motivations, learning attitude and learning strategies are often regarded as the most influential factors in students’ English learning. Then, quantitative analyses of the correlations between questionnaire data about the three individual differences and students’ English achievements were conducted with the aid of the SPSS procedures of Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation, ANOVA, and Descriptive statistics etc. In the light of the analysis results, there is no good or bad motivation. Instrumental, integrative, intrinsic, extrinsic and resultative motivations all are positively correlated with students’ achievements and can exert promoting effects on their English learning. Instrumental and intrinsic motivations play a greater role than others. The promoting function of a composite motivation is greater than that of any single kind. Learning attitudes can be distinguished as positive and negative. Positive learning attitudes have positive correlations with students’ achievements while negative attitudes show negative correlations with students’ achievements. Among all the attitudes, conscious learning attitude has the greatest positive effect on students’ English learning. Language learning strategies are also related with students’ English learning outcomes. There are positive correlations between all the language learning strategies and students’ English achievements. Memory, cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies are more highly correlated with students’ English learning. Students with high achievements show a significant difference in the use of these three strategies from those with low achievements. Affective and social strategies play a less important role in high school students’ English learning, which is probably because they are overlooked in high school English education. Based on the research results, the thesis provides some suggestions for high school English teaching.