A Study Of English Achievement Self-attribution Of Middle School Students

In accordance with B. Weiner’s attribution theory, the contemporary study investigated the English achievements attribution trend of middle school students. Attribution theory dates back to the mid-1950 s. Fritz Heider,who is considered as the father of “attribution theory”, first put forward the attribution theory in his book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations.Later, it was amended in 1980 s by Bernard Weiner, an American psychologist.In this study, attribution theory refers to how people account for his or others’ deeds and it exerts a strong influence on their moods, motivations and action.Literally attribution refers to causal attribution that results of behavior or events are ascribed to some reasons. Generally speaking, attribution is to search for the reasons why results happen. It has been testified that attribution theory impacts greatly on English learning and that it, to a great degree, will exert a strong influence on students’ emotions, motivations and their success expectancy. Furthermore, it is absolutely necessary for teachers to understand students’ attribution to success and failure in English learning, which is conducive to stimulating their learning motivation and influencing their learning process and learning outcomes.The study is aimed at answering the following three questions:(1) What is the current attribution trend of middle school students in English learning?(2) Is there any difference of attribution trend among different achievement levels’ students?(3) Do English achievements correlate with students’ attributions to success and failure in English learning?With the aim of resolving the research questions of the study, 420 grade three students are chosen as the subjects at random in Affiliated Middle School to Inner Mongolia Normal University. A questionnaire was employedto gather information of students’ attribution tend. They are from advanced class(excellent students), parallel class(good students) and self-financed class(average students). Based on their classes, the students are classified into group 1, group 2 and group 3. The data collected were entered into the computer and SPSS 17.0 was used to analyze them.The summary of major findings is as follows:(1) The current attribution trend of middle school students in English learning is relatively optimistic and they have the tendency to ascribe success and failure to effort.(2) The marked difference among them is that they take different views about the context’s influence on failure and that respondents with correspondingly low efficiency tend to ascribe their failure to context.(3) Attribution tendency is relevant to English efficiency. More specifically, there is positive relation among ability,effort and English efficiency and there is negative relation among context,luck and English efficiency. These findings demonstrate that it is absolutely necessary to conduct attribution training, to foster students’ optimistic attribution and to stimulate their learning motivation, which demonstrate evidence for the necessity of attribution training.