Ail Investigation Into Junior Middle School Students’ English Learning Self-efficacy And Academic Help-seeking

Schunk (1996) has pointed out help-seeking is a way individuals make use ofsocial resources to prompt their learning success. Many scholars both at home andabroad state that help-seeking is one of autonomous learning strategies, which isbeneficial to students’ learning. Self-efficacy has a broad motivation effect onindividuals. It allows individuals to produce designed level of performance tocomplete tasks and adapt themselves to the new environment, and it also functions asa mediator in language development. Help-seeking and self-efficacy are bothimportant to students’ learning process.This study is a quantitative analysis. The data was collected in the forms ofquestionnaire among308junior middle school students in a county middle school inJiangxi Province and analyzed with the help of SPSS16.0. The study is to investigatestudents’ English learning self-efficacy and their help-seeking attitudes and behaviorsas well as their correlations between them. The findings are as follows:1) Junior middle school students’ English self-efficacy is at a moderate level and itsdimension, sense of competence in task-completion is a little low; there existsignificant differences of English self-efficacy and its three dimensions based ongender and English achievements. Female students and high proficiency achievershold higher level of competency than male students and low proficiency achievers andlow graders exhibit higher confidence in their English learning than high graders.Only grade1and grade2have no significant difference in English self-efficacy.2) The benefit of help-seeking from junior middle school students is high while thethreat of help-seeking is not high but the threat of help-seeking from classmates ishigher than that from teacher. There are significant differences of help-seekingattitudes on gender and English achievements and grade. Female students and highproficiency achievers have more positive attitudes toward help-seeking and studentsin grade1and grade2think help-seeking is more beneficial than students in grade3.The frequency of help-seeking behaviors junior middle school students adopt fallsfrom a moderate level to a relatively low level in the sequence of instrumentalhelp-seeking from other people, autonomous help-seeking with tools, executive help-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking. Gender, achievements and grade causesignificant differences of help-seeking behaviors. Females and high proficiencyachievers conduct significantly more instrumental help-seeking from others andautonomous help-seeking while male students and low proficiency achievers resort tomore executive help-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking. Students in grade1andgrade2do more instrumental help-seeking and less executive help-seeking andavoidance of help-seeking than students in grade3. Only grade2and grade3havesignificant difference on autonomous help-seeking.3) English self-efficacy has positive correlations with instrumental help-seeking fromothers as well as benefit of help-seeking. Benefit of help-seeking is positivelycorrelated to instrumental help-seeking from people and passively correlated toexecutive help-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking.Based on the findings and analyses, the author offers some pedagogicalimplications to raise students’ English learning self-efficacy and increase instrumentalhelp-seeking from people and autonomous help-seeking with tools to facilitateEnglish teaching and practice.