A Study On High School Students’ Learned Helplessness And Attribution In English Learning

The concept of "Learned Helplessness" which means an organism shows his negative and unwilling mental state after experiencing some training or studying, was formally put forward in 1967 by the American psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman. Attribution is the process of making inference and judgment to the reason of one’s behavior according to related information and clues. The attribution theory was proposed by the American social psychologist Fritz Heider in 1958 and developed by Bernard Weiner and his colleagues. In the 1970s, the most accepted theory of attribution was systematically put forward by Weiner and since then it has enjoyed its popularity in psychology.Based on Seligman’s learned helplessness theory and Weiner’s attribution theory, this study includes two parts. First, by using SPSS19.0,132 questionnaires of learned helplessness and attribution which were finished by Senior 1 students from a high school in Shaanxi Province were analyzed via descriptive statistics, variance analysis and correlation analysis to know the current situation of senior students’learned helplessness and attribution for their academic achievements, as well as the relationship between the two. Second, two classes including 106 Senior 1 students from this school were chosen as experimental class and control class respectively to test the effect of attribution training on students’　academic achievement. The pre-test and post test results of the two classes were analyzed with Independent-Sample T-test and Paired-Sample T-test.The general statistical result in this research mainly indicates that, firstly, according to the data from attribution questionnaire, among the four factors of attribution students are inclined to attribute their academic achievement to ability and effort, especially effort, rather than luck and situation. There is no significant difference between genders in terms of attribution.Secondly, the attribution for academic achievement has correlation with students’ learned helplessness and academic achievement. English learned helplessness is positively correlated with luck (r=0.594, p<0.01) and situation (r=0.439, p<0.01) attributional factors while the correlations between effort or ability and English learned helplessness are not statistically significant. On the other hand, ability attributional factor is positively correlated with academic achievement (r=0.641, p<0.01) and effort attributional factor is also positively correlated with academic achievement (r=0.736, p<0.01). However, luck and situation factors of attribution are proved to have no significant correlation with academic achievement.Thirdly, before the attribution training experiment, there’s no significant difference between the English levels of the two classes (p>0.05). After the experiment, the post-test scores of both experimental class and control class increased. According to the means, the improving range of the experimental class is greater than that of the control class. So it can be concluded from the study that the attribution training experiment is helpful to improve students’　academic achievement.The results of this study has some implication for English teaching that are worthy of attention. In practical English teaching, teachers are advised to concern not only the acquisition of knowledge, but also students’　emotional changes in the process of knowledge acquisition. It’s of great significance and necessity to guide students to make positive attribution consciously and eliminate their learned helplessness in learning English so as to improve the teaching quality.