A Study On The Relationship Between Middle School Students' English Learning Self-efficacy And Their Use Of Self-regulated Learning Strategies

Self-efficacy is defined as beliefs in one's capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to produce given attainments,which has been of interest to the field of education for a long time.There are a lot of researches about the relationship between students' self-efficacy and their language performance.The researches revealed that students' self-efficacy has a positive correlation with their performance.Individuals with strong self-regulated learning(SRL)skills,characterized by the ability to plan,manage and control their learning process,can learn faster and achieve higher grades compared with those with weaker SRL skills.In recent years,the research conducted in university,middle and primary school show that self-efficacy influences self-regulated learning strategy.However,most of researches are about general self-efficacy and SRL.Under the context of second language acquisition,the researches about whether middle school students' English learning self-efficacy has relations with SRL are still few.Middle school students are in the critical period of physical and psychological aspects,and many of them have built the basis of English learning.Especially under the background of quality-oriented education,many students started to learn English at a very young age,so most of students have formed their own self-efficacy and SRL.Therefore,the research focuses on revealing the relationship between junior-high school students' self-efficacy and their SRL in English learning.In this research,251 Grade 7 to Grade 9 students from Wenzhou NO.2 middle school had been chosen.For the accuracy of the research,the six classes were all natural classes.According to The Questionnaire of English Self-Efficacy(QESE)made by Do-Hong Kim and his fellows in 2015 and The Questionnaire of English Self-Regulated Learning Strategies(QESRLS)made by Chuang Wang,G?tz Schwab...In 2012,the writer adapted them into the study instruments.The data of students' basic information,English learning self-efficacy and SRL had been collected.In order to decrease the error,the students' scores were the average numbers from their last semester's final examination and the latest test scores.SPSS 22.0 had been adopted to analyze the data.The main findings were as follows:1.There was no significant correlation between middle school students' genders and English learning self-efficacies.Comparing with male students,female students were apt to use self-evaluation strategy,seeking social assistance strategy,taking and reviewing records strategies among SRL strategies.2.There were significant positive correlations between middle school students' English learning durations and English learning self-efficacies.Also,significant positive correlations existing between students' English learning durations and organizing and transforming strategy in SRL strategies.3.There were significant positive correlations between middle school students' English academic performance and English learning self-efficacies.Generally speaking,there were significant positive correlations between middle school students' English academic performance and English SRL strategies,especially self-evaluation,organizing and transforming,seeking social assistance,persistence,seeking opportunity,taking records and goal-setting strategies.4.On the whole,middle school students' English learning self-efficacies had significant positive correlations with their SRL strategies.Among SRL strategies,comparing with the other two groups,low-level self-efficacies' students seldom used rehearsing and memorizing strategy,medium-level self-efficacies' students would like to adopt native language to help with English learning,and high-level self-efficacies' students were apt to use interpretive guessing in English learning.The study results indicated that English learning SRLS plays an important role in the process of English learning,which has significant influence on students' self-efficacy and performance.The students who could adopt various strategies have better performance and higher self-efficacy compared with those seldom using strategies.If English teachers could consciously conduct students to learn and use the SRLS properly,above all interpretive guessing strategy,the students' English performance will have obvious improvement.