Study On Learned Helplessness In Tibetan Students’ English Learning

The theory of Learned Helplessness is first proposed by an American psychologist Seligman in 1967. It refers that after a longtime failure or repeated punishment, people will face the uncontrollable problems once happened with a feeling of powerless. In terms of learning process, this phenomenon occurs when someone is in a situation with repeated failure experience during their learning process and the gradual feeling of hopeless and helpless in emotion, behavior, cognition and motivation will appear. It is a kind of negative psychological phenomenon which mainly consists of the helplessness in emotion, cognition, behavior and motivation that forms after experiencing the failure of learning.This study is based on a large number of references about the Learned Helplessness and the practical researches of internship study in Qinghai Vocational and Technical Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary for a period of three months. The object is chosen on the basis of in-depth interviews and open questionnaires, and totally 108 Tibetan students have chosen as the subject of the study. The questionnaire of the Learned Helplessness of the Tibetan students in English has been divided into four dimensions named emotional, cognitive, behavioral and motivational helplessness. And the analysis of the level of Learned Helplessness of the Tibetan students in this research is also mainly based on these four dimensions.This study investigates the main factors which have caused the sense of Learned Helplessness in English learning of Tibetan students, and it has also studied the relationship between the Learned Helplessness and attribution style through data analysis. The followings are the four findings of this research.1) The level of Learned Helplessness of Tibetan students in English learning is in a higher stage. The average score of cognitive helplessness is higher than the other three dimensions, but there is no significant difference between the four factors.2) The factors that impact the level of Learned Helplessness of Tibetan students have significant difference in the students’ different sources and family background, while the time of learning English and the school teaching environment are the indirect factors which have influenced the form of Learned Helplessness.3) The Tibetan students tend to have a negative attribution style during English learning. Because they tend to attribute the failure to the low ability and attribute the success to luck and environment. Which means that the negative attribution style can lead a higher level of Learned Helplessness during the English learning of the Tibetan students.4) There are significant relationship between the attribution style and the Learned Helplessness level during the Tibetan students’ English learning. Different attribution styles of the students lead to the different levels of Learned Helplessness. The factor of ability, luck and environment in the attribution style can predict the level of Learned Helplessness.The innovation of this study is: It has analyzed the different factors that caused the sense of Learned Helplessness of the Tibetan students in English learning depending on their basic English learning standards. It has proposed that the college educators should divide the students into different classes according to their different English learning basis. In this consideration, the students of different study levels will study in a practical learning environment. This kind of teaching model can not only reduce the students’ feeling of Learned Helplessness in the process of learning English, but also help the teacher to improve their teaching quality and efficiency.