A Survey On English Self-efficacy Of Kazakh And Han High School Students In English Learning

Self-efficacy,put forward by American psychologist Albert Bandura(1977),is individual's judgment and evaluation of their abilities,so it is also called the sense of self ability.A large number of researches on L2 acquisition show that English academic self-efficacy has significantly positive correlation with English proficiency,and is an important predictive variable to English achievement.Based on the theory of self-efficacy put forward by Bandura(1977),in this survey,117 Kazakh students,who have learned English with Han students all the time,and 216 Han students of a senior school are randomly chosen as subjects to investigate their English self-efficacy and the sources of their English self-efficacy.The investigation focuses on the following three research questions:(1)What is the current situation of the English self-efficacy of Kazakh and Han Chinese high school students in the same learning environment?(2)Are there any differences existing in English self-efficacy of Kazakh and Han students based on gender,grade,urban and rural difference and the difference in their English academic achievement?(3)What are the main influencing factors that affect the English self-efficacy of Kazakh and Han students in Xinjiang?To achieve the aim,the methods of quantitative(Questionnaires)and qualitative(Interview)analysis are employed.After the response collected,SPSS 17.0 is used to analyze the data.The results show as follows:1)As a whole,the current situation of Kazakh and Han students' English self-efficacy is not high.However,there exists significant difference between Kazakh and Han students.Kazakh students' score on English self-efficacy is higher than that of Han students.2)As to the differences of Kazakh and Han students' self-efficacy,firstly,there is no significant gender difference for both Kazakh and Han students.Secondly,For Kazakh students,the dimension of confidence in achieving goals has significant difference between urban and rural students.Thirdly,there is significant grade difference in ability to face setback for both Kazakh and Han students,with grade ascending,Kazakh students' abilities to face setback have a rising trend,while those of Han students are declining.Fourthly,in the points of students' English academic achievements,there is positive correlation with English self-efficacy for both Kazakh and Han students.In detail,there exists significant difference between English achievements of Kazakh students and their English self-efficacy,including its two dimensions of the ability to accomplish the task and confidence in achieving goals.However,between Han students' English achievement and their English self-efficacy,including all four dimensions,have significant differences.3)Through the survey on the influential factors of self-efficacy,the following results are found.Firstly,both Kazakh and Han students consider that verbal persuasion,vicariousexperience,mastery experience and emotional arousal play very important roles in developing self-efficacy in accordance with the influencing factors proposed by Bandura(1977).Secondly,both Kazakh and Han students highlight the effect of environment setting,and Kazakh students especially emphasis on this point to put it in the first place among the influencing factors.Whereas,Han students think that teacher's confidence is the most important.The last is that self-confidence,learning strategies,teaching material and multiple learning methods play more important roles in the formation of Kazakh students' self-efficacy than Han students.According to the results of the survey,the current situation of Kazakh and Han high school students' English self-efficacy is not very high,their English self-efficacy should be improved.However,due to the differences between Kazakh and Han students,educators or teachers should adopt some different effective ways to help them improve their English self-efficacy.