An Attributional Study Of Students In English Learning In Rural Junior Middle School

Attribution theory has an extremely important effect in English learning.As for students,their attributions for the prior learning outcomes may cause their emotional reaction,and this may influence their prediction toward future success and to what extent they will put effort into future learning task.As for teachers,to understand students' attribution in English learning will help teachers arouse students' interests and will motivate students.Thus,this research,adopting questionnaire and interview methods,was carried out to investigate the attributional tendency of 331 students in rural middle school and the differences in terms of proficiency and genders.And the questionnaire can be divided into two parts: attribution for their success and attribution for their failure.In order to get a relatively detailed attribution,each part consists of 16 items.Follow-up interviews were used to investigate the origins of their attributions.The results,which were analyzed by SPSS,showed that students in rural middle school tended to consider their success in English learning as interactions between internal factors and external factors,and attribute their failure to external factors.Additionally,some statistically significant differences were discovered between attribution and proficiency and gender in English learning.They were summarized as follows:(1)in terms of proficiency,more proficient students were more likely to attribute their success to controllable internal factors,while less proficient students tend to uncontrollable external factors;(2)in terms of gender,male students were inclined to attribute their success to luck,their failure to internal factors,while female students tended to attribute their success to interest,effort and teaching effect and their failure to lack of effort.Based on the research results,some problems in English learning and teaching arose,thus some pedagogical suggestions for foreign language learning and teaching were presented.They are listed as follows:(1)students should hold a correct understanding about English subject and should cultivate and keep their interest in English learning.(2)Teachers should encourage students to study harder especially when students fail in the exams;teachers should make English learning become more and more interesting;teachers should help students,especially those who are less proficient students,build their confidence in English study;teachers should implement attributional training properly.