A Study On Relationships Between College English Classroom Environment And Students’ Learning Outcomes

Learning, an innate ability of human beings, develops in the process of interaction with the society, which is definitely influenced by the environment in which it occurs. Language learning takes place in some certain environment as well, so it is necessary to pay special attention to the influencing factors of environment on language learning. For Chinese learners, they are not blessed with a natural English learning environment, and classroom is the main place for them to learn English. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the influencing factors of environment on language learning for English learners to improve their English level and for English teachers to enhance their teaching quality. The study on associations between classroom environment and students’ learning outcomes, usually explored in terms of teachers’ and students’perceptions of classroom environment, is becoming the hot topic in the field of classroom environment researches. A lot of researches have been made on the associations between classroom environment and students’learning outcomes abroad, but most of them focused on science classroom environment in primary and middle schools. And in China, although an increasing number of researches in this field, especially researches on College English classroom environment, have emerged in recent years, little has been done on the internal influencing factors of them. Therefore, it is of special significance to carry out a study in this area.The present study aims to explore the following questions:1. What’s the overall condition of College English classroom environment?2. Is there any perceptional difference between the male and female students in their College English classroom? If yes, what is it?3. Is there any association between students’perception of their College English classroom environment and students’English learning outcomes? If yes, what is it?4. How does students’ perception of College English classroom environment influence their English learning outcomes?In order to answer these questions, the author carried out a study on 640 non-English majors from a research university in Shanxi. The study used two questionnaires, which were College English Classroom Environment Inventory (CECEI) and Test of English Related Attitudes (TOERA).After the data were collected, they were analyzed by SPSS 17.0. The findings are as follows. Firstly, students’ perceptions of their College English classroom are relatively positive and favorable for students’ learning. Secondly, there is no perceptional difference on their English classroom environment between male and female students on the whole level, but significant difference exists on four scales:Teacher Support, Task Orientation, Cooperation and Teacher Leadership. Thirdly, there is a relationship between classroom environment and students’ learning outcomes.The results achieved in this study provided some pedagogical implications:teachers should encourage students to study in a cooperative way to get students involved in classroom learning; teachers should carry out the task-centered teaching to arouse students’ enthusiasm for classroom learning; teachers should give students emotional support to inspire their learning motivation; teachers should adopt new teaching methods to make students interested in learning for long.