Learned Helplessness Of English Learning And Intervening Strategies

The term Learned Helplessness refers to the psychological condition or behavior of individual students who feel helpless or even unconfident for their further tasks of learning when they have suffered from repeated setbacks and failures. This phenomenon may well explain the facts of low class attendance, high truancy, and poor performance in the English classroom among a large proportion of the secondary vocational students. This perplexity among the students may not only decrease their learning incentive, hinder their cognitive development and lead to some emotional traumas, but also affect their learning achievements in a greater sense. Learned Helplessness, however, is something that can be alleviated or even entirely removed with proper training in intervening strategies since it is something learnt later rather than inborn. A combined effort of exploring countermeasures with a targeted training of corresponding strategies, therefore, seems crucial and necessary for the improvement of students’ English performance in schools.Taking a vocational school in Yunnan Province as a case of study, the author aims to discover possible causes for students’ Learned Helplessness in vocational schools, tries to figure out corresponding strategies for a targeted training, and to alleviate or even to remove their Learned Helplessness for the enhancement of their incentive and confidence. Firstly the author investigates the state of and causes for her students’ Learned Helplessness. Then it is followed by an exploration and targeted training of possible strategies for this phenomenon, such as goal reconstructing, attribution training, positive evaluating, and learning strategies training.The author arrives at two conclusions through a detailed analysis of the results obtained from her pilot training of strategies. First, the survey indicates that the causes for her students’ Learned Helplessness fall into both the internal and external types. The external type include such kinds as social discrimination, negative parental evaluation, disharmonious relationship between teachers and students, and difficult tasks in English learning. The internal factors cover such items as emotional disorders, improper attribution style, lack of effective strategies, and low incentive for learning on the students’ part. Second, the results of the experimental training show that, through a lengthened experiment, the experimental class receive higher scores than the control class do. So she argues that her training has effectively improved her students’ incentive for and confidence in English learning.