A Research On Middle School English Teachers’ Learned Helplessness

In1967, Seligman, an American psychologist reported the theory of learned helplessness. It is a mental state in which an organism forced to endure aversive stimuli, or stimuli that are painful or otherwise unpleasant, becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are escapable, presumably because it has learned that it cannot control the situation. Learned helplessness theory is also the view that clinical depression and related mental illnesses may result from a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation. Organisms that have been ineffective and less sensitive in determining the consequences of their behaviour are defined as having acquired learned helplessness. Known that learned helplessness has aroused more interest among researchers who have already developed many theories that are applied in education and clinical medicine, particularly in examining the influence of learned helplessness on human beings’learning.At present, there have been a few researches on teachers’learned helplessness and this article is aimed at teachers in order to provide corresponding theory basis for teachers’learned helplessness. It mainly investigated how much teachers in senior middle school suffered learned helplessness, and researched the reasons causing English teachers’learned helplessness as well as the influence on teachers’teaching.Based on predecessors’research, my own experiences and conditions in the middle school, a questionnaire and some in-depth interview questions are designed so as to get a clearer picture of the English teachers’learned helplessness in senior middle school. Having learned more on how senior middle school English teachers suffered from learned helplessness, the article analyzed what caused senior middle school English teachers’ learned helplessness, and explored how their learned helplessness influenced their English teaching and effective strategies to deal with teachers’learned helplessness. The findings are:(1) Learned helplessness is common among senior middle school English teachers’ teaching, but how much it influences teachers’teaching seems to have little difference to their ages, years of teaching in senior middle school and genders.(2)Major causes of middle school English teachers’learned helplessness include teachers’low achievement motivation, low self-efficiency, incorrect attribution and lack of teachers’professional development.(3) Learned helplessness has a large influence on teaching. It is likely to result in job burnout, students’learning learned helplessness, teaching mistakes, and hindering teachers’improvement.The questionnaire on English teachers’learned helplessness in senior middle school constitutes an enrichment for current study in learned helplessness of China through analyzing previous documents, then subjects in the research are teachers’learned helplessness while most of the domestic research on it paid more attention to teachers instead of teachers. Moreover, there are fewer researches involving learned helplessness of senior middle school English teachers. However, the theory is being paid more and more attention and this article attempted to study how senior middle school English teachers suffered from learned helplessness, hoping to offer reliable reference to educators for better teaching activities and a good base for the later studies.