A Comparative Study Of Urban And Rural Junior High Students’ English Learning Belief

Beliefs about English learning are the ideas and opinions about English learning held by English language learners, which have huge impact on the process and result of English language learning. In order to understand the junior high school students’ beliefs about English learning, this study aims to investigate the beliefs about English learning held by Junior high school students from urban and rural areas in China. The present study also addresses the question about whether there are significant differences of learner beliefs about English learning between these two groups of students who are from urban and rural areas respectively. The current paper conducts empirical research by the means of questionnaire, which serves to answer the following three questions:1) What English learning beliefs are held by Chinese urban junior high school students in general?2) What English learning beliefs are held by Chinese rural junior high school students in general?3) Are there any significant differences in students’ beliefs about English learning between urban junior high students and rural ones? If the differences do exist, what are they?Through doing a survey on 180 students (90 urban junior high students and 90 rural ones), which uses Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) as this paper’s questionnaire, the current findings reveal that most of the urban junior high students hold much more positive and facilitative beliefs about English learning, but they also hold a few negative and unrealistic beliefs. As for the whole panorama of rural junior high students’ beliefs about English learning, majority of them hold lots of negative beliefs. Moreover, through comparing these two groups’ beliefs, it has revealed that there are many differences in beliefs about English learning between urban junior high students and rural ones. Besides, urban junior high students’ beliefs about English learning are much better and more positive than rural ones’ beliefs.Based on the findings of this present study, this paper sheds some light on the junior high school English language education, especially in rural junior high school settings. For the English education in rural areas, English teachers need to do more to help rural junior high students to form positive and facilitative beliefs about English learning.