| As an important individual affective factor, self-efficacy refers to the subjective judgment of one's ability to organize and execute given performances in certain situations. It's the manifestation of confidence in a certain task and affects people's achievements by influencing their cognitive process, motivation,emotion and choice. However, in traditional college English class, affective factors of non-English majors have been long ignored. Many non-English majors are not motivated in English learning and they show little interest in it and lose confidence.Many experts and scholars have conducted some researches from different angles to improve students' self-efficacy. However, few scholars have studied how to improve non-English majors' self-efficacy from the angle of a specific teaching approach. As a kind of new teaching approach,Problem-based Learning(PBL) takes problems as the starting point. Under the guidance of the teacher, students can improve the ability to solve practical problems and cultivate cognitive and emotional attitude through cooperative and independent inquiry. PBL attaches great importance to students' active involvement and pays close attention to their attitudes and emotion that they show in learning. PBL helps to stimulate students' interest and motivation in leaning. Since the birth of PBL, many scholars and experts have conducted many researches about its effect in English learning. Little empirical researches have been conducted by far, and even fewer studies are made on the effect of PBL on students' self-efficacy.This thesis attempts to explore whether Problem-based Learning(PBL)affects English self-efficacy of non-English majors that can provide suggestions for teachers in college English teaching. There are two research questions in this thesis are to be addressed:(1) Which approach will be more effective in improving non-English majors' English learning self-efficacy, PBL or traditional teaching approach?(2) Would the application of PBL improve English proficiency of non-English majors? To achieve this aim, on the basis of self-efficacy and other related theories,the author has applied PBL to the English classes in Shandong Radio and Television University for 16 weeks in the first half of 2015. 92 students from two parallel classes were selected as the participants of the study. One class was randomly selected as the experimental class and was taught by PBL. The other class was regarded as the control class and was taught by thetraditional teaching approach. According to students' level of self-efficacy obtained from the pre-test, the students of the experimental class are divided into the low achievers and high achievers as the basis for grouping. Research instruments in this teaching experiment included English Self-efficacy Scale and English test. The author used quantitative research methods and input the experimental data into SPSS17.0. The experimental results were made with quantitative and qualitative analysis of English Self-efficacy Scale and English test.This experiment proves that:(1) PBL can more effectively enhance non-English majors' English self-efficacy and English level according to the analytical results between pre-test and post-test;(2) PBL can effectively improve students' interests in learning English and advance their English proficiency. Finally, the author suggests that PBL should be adopted effectively in order to change the current state of college English teaching and help students improve self-efficacy and make greater progress. However, due to the restraints of some related factors,both objective and subjective, for example, the short experimental time, the not-enough-deep processing and analysis of data and the capability of the researcher, there are some inescapable restrictions in this study. Greater efforts are needed to take to investigate these issues later on. |
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