A Correlation Study Of Chinese College Students At HUU On English Achievement And Achievement Motivation

As one of the key factors of English learning, achievement motivation has receivedmore and more attention. Many scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of studiesabout it and most of them worked at the influence of students’ self-awareness, autonomyand anxiety on achievement motivation. And most of the studies worked at the level ofrational discussion and lacked empirical supports. The present paper is carried out withthe purpose of finding out the correlation between English achievement and achievementmotivation of Chinese college students, and investigating the influential factors.190sophomores at Hebei United University, including both English majors and non-English majors, are chosen to be participants randomly. Questionnaires, interview andclassroom observation are carried out. Through analyzing the result of questionnaireswith SPSS13.0, it is revealed that most students are high in achievement motivation andthere is no significant difference between English majors’ and non-English majors’achievement motivation level. The correlation between participants’ achievementmotivation and their English achievement is not significant. As for their attribution style,most students tend to attribute their positive outcomes to effort and most individuals tendto give internal reasons when they explain their failures. It can be seen that there are agreat number of students who cannot attribute positively. The result of interview revealsthat interest, learning environment and teaching content are taken as the three mostimportant influential factors of students’ English achievement. The findings of classroomobservation indicate that students are passive in English class and their achievementmotivation is not adequately aroused.Based on the findings, it is imperative to take concrete measures to stimulatestudents’ achievement motivation. Therefore, some suggestions about how to arouse andstimulate their achievement motivation and carry out the attribution training are putforward with the hope of providing some references for English teaching．...