A Study Of Senior High Scnool Students, Expectancy-value In English Learning

Expectancy-value, which is first put forward by Atkinson in 1957, refers that the motivation of people engaged in any activity, depends on the perceived likelihood of achieving their goal and the subjective value of the target. Expectancy-value theory is one of the most influential motivation theory. Motivation is the internal factor which directly promotes foreign language learning. Therefore, expectancy-value is the key factor affecting English learning.Through literature review, it is found that most studies have been focused on children, middle school students, and college students, neglecting senior high school students. For this reason, the study attempts to study senior high school students' expectancy-value in English learning, which will probe into four issues: 1) The general picture of senior high school students' expectancy-value in English learning. 2) The difference on expectancy-value between male students and female students. 3) The relationship among three components of expectancy-value, namely expectation for success, subjective task value and study competitiveness. 4) The correlation between expectancy-value and academic performance.The participants of the study are 237 senior high school students from Suichuan middle school, with 140 male students and 97 female students. The instruments are a questionnaire made by Eccles et al.(1983), an English final examination and a semi-structured interview. All the data from the questionnaire and the final examination are analyzed by SPSS 16.0, including descriptive analysis, independent sample t-test and Pearson correlation analysis. Besides, the interviews are analyzed qualitatively.The results of the study are as follows:1. Senior high school students have an overall medium degree of expectancy-value in English learning. Among the three components of expectancy-value, senior high school students have the highest subjective task value and the lowest expectation of success. And students own relatively higher study competitiveness.2. There exist significant differences between male students and female students in their overall English expectancy-value(p=0.000<0.05). Female students realize much more subjective value in English learning than male students and expectation of successdifference between male students and female students is the smallest among the components of expectancy-value.3. Subjective task value has a positive relation with expectation of success and study competitiveness respectively. However, there is no relation between expectation of success and study competitiveness.4. The overall expectancy-value has a positively significant correlation with students' English academic performance. Among the three components of expectancy-value, expectation of success has the highest correlation with academic performance while study competitiveness has the lowest relation with academic performance.According to the results of the work, some suggestions on enhancing senior high school students' expectancy-value are given, followed by limitations of the study.