A Comparative Study Of The Self-efficacy In English Pronunciation Of Low And High Achievers In Senior High School

Plentiful researches on self-efficacy have been conducted in the second language acquisition since it was first put forward by American psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977.It has been demonstrated that students' English academic self-efficacy shows positive correlation with their English academic achievement.However,there is still a huge gap in the studies concerning about English pronunciation self-efficacy of senior high school students.In practice,the status of pronunciation teaching and learning is worrying,because both English teachers and English learners usually overlook English pronunciation,therefore,poor pronunciation and pronunciation self-efficacy result in.And that would hinder the development of listening,speaking,reading and writing among the senior high school students,especially English low achievers.Based on such situation,the author is inspired to conduct this study.The research was carried out to explore the status quo of the English pronunciation self-efficacy of the senior high students,the differences in the English pronunciation self-efficacy between the English low and high achievers,the role of English pronunciation self-efficacy in English learning and the effective ways to improve the students' English pronunciation self-efficacy.In this research,94 senior high school students from two classes of Grade One in Lai Shan No.1 Middle School in Yantai City are taken as participants.Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are applied to the study.Questionnaire,interview and class observation serve as research instruments.To find out the status quo and the differences in English pronunciation self-efficacy between English low and high achievers in senior high school objectively,a scale of high validity and reliability was made and revised based on some previous studies.Then the questionnaires were handed out in the two chosen classes and the data of ninety students were gathered and analyzed with the help of SPSS19.0 and Excel.On the basis of the collected information,the interview questions were designed and as a result,interviews were carried out among 6 students to find out how English pronunciation self-efficacy affects the students' English academic achievement and help them develop positive attitudes towards pronunciation learning.In order to find out the most effective strategies to improve the students' English pronunciation self-efficacy,interferential experiment was conducted for one whole month with the methods of class observation,post-questionnaire and a second interview.The major findings of the study are briefly concluded below:First,the English pronunciation self-efficacy of senior high students is generally under the medium level.Secondly,the pronunciation self-efficacy of English high achievers is significantly higher than that of low achievers,embodied in six dimensions of the questionnaire.English low achievers valued their efforts to practice pronunciation best while high achievers valued their phonetic knowledge best compared to other factors.However,both of them lack motivation and inspiration to practice pronunciation.Next,the students' English pronunciation self-efficacy positively correlates with their English academic achievement.It is obvious that the students with low EPS tend to lack confidence and motivation to pronounce and have difficulty in listening,speaking and vocabulary memorizing,which naturally discourages the students' EAA.Lastly,it's the most effective way to encourage the students to read aloud via imitation,which has evident effects on building students' confidence and facilitating students' learning motivation.Besides,stressing the phonetics rules during listening practice and vocabulary acquisition also works greatly.This comparative study attempts to find the impacts of EPS on English learning and propose some implications for the teaching and learning of pronunciation in senior high schools in China.