Correlational Study Of English Major Undergraduates’ Classroom Climate And Their Learning Performance

The foreign language teaching involves five factors: needs analysis, curriculum design,textbooks compilation, classroom teaching and course evaluation(Shu, 2006). Among which the most important is the classroom teaching which the teachers and students take part in together. Because no matter how much effort is spent on the study of teaching methods and syllabus, they can be only realized in classroom teaching(Allwright & Bailey, 1991). Our traditional education has been dominated by examination-oriented education for long. This kind of education is characterized by neglecting students’ subjectivity and interaction of teachers’ and students’ mentality. So the importance of classroom climate has not drawn enough attention.The previous research abroad predominantly focuses on the analysis of teachers’ behaviors and students’ consciousness to classroom climate. Early in the 1920 s, Thomas started the study of classroom climate in America. He focused on the teachers’ and students’ behaviors in class instead of the psychological significance of those behaviors(Dorman,2002). From the mid-1960 s to the present, the researchers paid more attention to study students’ perceptions of their classroom climate. The domestic studies are mainly conducted in terms of contents and subjects. And most of them only introduce the western studies of class climate and focus on the primary and middle schools.To sum up, all the previous research at home focuses on the introduction to the research in the west and concrete teaching experiences at home. The empirical study of the correlation between foreign language classroom environment and grades in China is far from sufficient.Therefore, the focus of the present study is to explore the correlation between English major undergraduates’ perceptions of classroom climate and their learning performance in Shandong Agricultural University. Guided by the theory of Group Dynamics, this study applied the Connected Classroom Climate Inventory to the Chinese university classrooms.The research questions are formulated as:(1) How do first-year, second-year and third-year English major students in a required language course perceive their classroom climate as measured by the Connected Classroom Climate Inventory?(2) Are there any differences in the undergraduates’ perceived classroom climate?(3) Is there any correlation between classroom climate and students’ learning performance?In order to answer the above questions, the author took one hundred and seventy-four English major students in Shandong Agricultural University as subjects, using stratified cluster sampling and the instrument of connected classroom climate inventory. The empirical data for this study was collected by using questionnaires and English achievement measures.Then the data was put into computer and analyzed in Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS 13.0). In addition, after obtaining the results of questionnaire survey, the author did interviews with 12 participants to get more qualitative information, which might help to explain the difference among the classroom climate scores of the students.The results of the study indicated that 1) There are strong student-to-student connections and positive classroom environment in all three groups; 2) There is no significant difference among the three groups’ classroom climate. But the classroom climate score in the third-year class is a bit higher than that of both the first-year and the second-year classes; 3) The correlation between climate scores and final course grades is significantly positive for all three groups, and the correlation coefficient of the third-year students is the highest.