The Study Of Rural Junior High School Students’ English Self-handicapping Behaviors

The Self-Worth Theory represented by Covington shows that ability,success, self-worth has formed a chain of relationships: ability can make people become successful and success can make people form a sense of self-value. It can produce a greater sense of self-worth when we attribute success to ability. However, in achievement orientation society, only a handful of people can be successful. People will lose confidence and the strong sense of powerlessness will reduce the enthusiasm to engage in activities when they fail in the long-term pursuit of success. As time passes, people will take some protective measures to try to avoid failure and set some situational factors to interfere with their success, so that they can protect their self-value when evaluation activities occurs associated with individual ability. In this way,they can attribute failure to other factors except for ability and avoid the negative results due to their poor performance. This is the self-handicapping behavior.The study of academic self-handicapping starts in the 90 s of the 20 th century. A number of educational psychologists began to study students’ self-impeding behaviors during school and classroom capacity assessment of this typical scenario. Students all have the same experience that success makes people feel satisfied, self-esteem, and also can produce a sense of self-worth from a childhood. But failure in the exam will produce a greater negative impact for students. Students tend to regard failure as incompetent,which will lead them to take measures to block their academic success in order to protect their self-value. In this way, if they fail in the exams, they can attribute it to other factors except for their competence in order to protect their self-value. These behaviors are students’ academic self-handicapping.Academic self-handicapping is a kind of non-adaptive strategy. It can lead to students’ low grades and make the students produce more self-handicapping behaviors.Under China’ current education system, scores are still the only standardto measure the success of students. This makes the school, parents, teachers,and even students themselves inevitably care about academic performance too much. As one of the three major subjects, English is always the key part of the exam. However, in the absence of true language environment, both the teachers and students feel the difficulty in language study. Teachers fail to pay much attention to students’ self-handicapping behaviors in English learning. Students just study for the exam and they don’t really have any interest in English subject.The study of self-handicapping has been more than 30 years abroad. At the same time, the study of self-handicapping also has certain development in China which produced rich research results. Based on the references of existing research results, these studies intends to preliminary and systematically investigate the rural junior middle school students’ English subject academic self-handicapping behavior by using the method of questionnaire survey first in Guyang,Batou.Relevant data about the subjects’ self-handicapping and achievement motivation was analyzed by using the statistical software SPSS.19. The main contents of data analysis include the following three parts:The first part is to present a descriptive statistical analysis of the differences in students’ academic self handicapping with regard to gender,grade and levels of English. The second part is to make a descriptive statistical analysis of the differences in students’ achievement motivation with regard to gender, grade and different levels of English. The third part is to analysze the relationship between students’ achievement motivation and academic self-handicapping. The writer also interviewed some of the participants to try to get further understanding of students’ psychological characteristics, and attempts to analyze the causes of the students’ self-handicapping behaviors. At the same time the writer intends to help teachers to have a full understanding of their students so that they can take measures to reduce the students’ academic self handicapping behaviors.The subjects of this study are 203 students from No.3 Middle School inGuyang, Baotou of Inner Mongolia. They are from year one to year three. The interviewer of this study are chosen from the above 203 students. There are five students of each year and they were interviewed in their free time.The first version of the self-handicapping scale was designed by Rhodewalt(1900). Li Xiaodong’ and other educational psychologists’ self-handicapping scales(2004) are used to revise into an academic self-handicapping scale of learning about English.The sample of this study is from the No. 3 Middle School in Guyang,Baoyou of Inner Mongolia. 203 students attend this test. They are from Grade1, Grade 2, and Grade 3. The results of the study are as follows:First, there exists gender difference between the rural junior middle school students’ English academic self-handicapping behaviors. Boy’s English academic self-handicapping behaviors is obviously higher than Girl’s.However, girls are better than boys in the pursuit of academic success.Second, there exists grade difference between the rural junior middle school students’ English academic self-handicapping behaviors. The second year students’ academic self-handicapping behavior is significantly higher than the third year students’. The first-year junior high school students have the lowest academic self-handicapping behavior. However, the first year students are better than the third year students in the pursuit of academic success. The second grade students have the minimum motivation to pursue success.Third, there exists academic achievement difference between the rural junior middle school students’ English academic self-handicapping behaviors.Students’ self-handicapping level is mainly the low level students > general students > top students > good students. There also exists achievement motivation difference between the rural junior middle school students’ pursuit of success. That is the good student good > top students > poor students>students in general.Fourth, the relevance of the whole rural middle school students’ self handicapping and overall achievement motivation is not obvious.Through the interview, the author understands that there are mainly several reasons that cause students’ different self-handicapping behaviors. Firstly, the students attribute their success and failure to different factors. Secondly, boys and girls are different in their claim of self-handicapping and behavioral self- handicapping. Thirdly, the second year students have the highest self-handicapping level. Because with the increasing difficulty of learning, some students find it hard to make progress in English learning, so their confidence in English learning is greatly reduced, which affects their sense of self-value and results in self sabotage.