A Research On The Correlation Between Self-efficacy And Autonomous Learning Competence Of Non-English Majors In English Learning Process

Life-long learning and life-long education have been the dominant educational beliefs due to the development of modern society. Thanks to the foundation and population of Humanistic Theory and Constructivism Theory, learners themselves have turned out to be the center of educational practice. Learner autonomy has become a major goal of teaching and learning since then. College English Curriculum Requirements for Non-English Majors, issued in2007, proclaimed that one goal for college English teaching is to cultivate learners’autonomous learning capability and to improve their comprehensive cultural sense to meet the requirements of domestic and international development. Besides, autonomous learning competence is a criterion to judge whether the educational reform is a success or a failure.Previous studies have laid a solid foundation for the study of autonomous learning. Taking those researches abroad and at home into consideration, they mainly pay attention to the definition, its theoretical foundations, the necessity of developing it, and the ways of cultivating such a competence. Whereas, relevant studies from individuals’ affective factors, especially from self-efficacy perspective, to investigate autonomous learning competence are relatively not enough. This thesis takes English learning self-efficacy as the independent variable, and makes use of interview and questionnaires to investigate the present condition of non-English majors’ self-efficacy and autonomous learning competence and the relationship between them.Non-English majors enrolled in year2012, namely, the freshmen, in YiLi Normal College are selected as the experimental subjects. The instruments applied are English self-efficacy questionnaire, English autonomous learning competence questionnaire, together with an interview. To get designated results, SPSS19.0is adopted to analyze the collected data. It can be concluded that:(1) Non-English majors’English learning self-efficacy and English autonomous learning do not present obvious differences in gender aspect. A quite minute difference still exists. Specifically speaking, as for autonomous learning competence, male learners perform a little better in motivation and learning objective, while females perform a little better in learning strategy use and learning process monitor. As for self-efficacy, males perform a little better than females. It is testified that gender doesn’t show significant influence on them.(2) Non-English majors’English learning achievement does show significant influence on these two aspects. Learners with high English learning achievements perform quite better in self-efficacy and autonomous learning competence than those with poor learning results.(3) Non-English majors’English learning self-efficacy and English autonomous learning competence are significantly and positively correlated. More specifically speaking, the three dimensions of English learning self-efficacy are positively and significantly correlated with every dimension of autonomous learning competence. By investigating and analyzing the current state of non-English majors’self-efficacy and autonomous learning and the correlation between them, the existed problems are figured out. As the ultimate goal is to solve the existed problems, some suggestions to develop and improve English learning self-efficacy and autonomous learning competence of non-English majors are put forward in the thesis. These mainly include:guiding learners to set appropriate objectives in accordance with their capabilities; helping them choose suitable learning strategies; cultivating their English learning interests and motivation, and so on. Hoping teachers and learners can draw some implications and make English autonomous learning competence easy to develop.