A Research On The Relationship Among Teacher-student Relationship,Academic Help-seeking And Academic Achievement In English Learning Of Rural Junior Middle School Students

With the development of research on foreign language learning and teaching,more and more factors are found out to be closely related to foreign language learning.Academic help-seeking,as a kind of learning strategy,belongs to the learner's internal factors.But it has a direct relationship with the external environment as well.On the other hand,many left-behind children in rural schools in China are in lack of the advanced learning resources and help from family and parents in English learning.As a result,their academic help-seeking behavior is inevitably closely connected with their relationship with the teacher.Consequently,their academic performance can be affected by both.Based on a three years English teaching practice in a rural junior middle school,the writer of this paper aims to find out the current situation of rural students' English learning in aspects of academic help-seeking and teacher-student relationship,ascertaining the relationship between the language achievement and the two.Through the research,the writer wishes to obtain a positive enlightenment in teaching to improve teaching quality and students' academic performance.In order to achieve the purpose,the writer investigated 184 rural junior middle school students ranging from grade seven to nine in Huaxi,Xiaochang,Hubei Province.Two questionnaires:Teacher-student Relationship Scale(TSRS)by Pianta and Academic Help-seeking Scale by Li Xiaodong and a further interview are conducted.The thesis aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the current state of the teacher-student relationship and academic help-seeking?(2)Is there a correlation between the teacher-student relationship and academic help-seeking?If there is,what kind of relationship do they have?(3)Does the teacher-student relationship or academic help-seeking have any influences on students' language achievement?If they do,what are their influences?The results of the survey are as follows:(1)The teacher-student relationship in rural middle school is generally in good condition,mainly in close and dependent types,showing that the rural middle school students and their English teachers have harmonious and positive interactions in daily teaching activities in aspects of cognition,emotion and behavior;As for academic help-seeking,instrumental academic help-seeking behavior is given priority to,which means that when rural middle school students meet difficulties in learning English,most of them choose a positive way for help by turning to teachers;The rural middle school's teacher-student relationship shows no significant differences in gender and grade,while the students' academic help-seeking behavior differs in both aspects.(2)The teacher-student relationship and academic help-seeking in rural middle school have correlation in each dimension:the close and dependent relationship and instrumental help-seeking are positively correlated,while these two types of relationship are negatively correlated with executive help-seeking and avoidance of help-seeking.This implicates that the more closer a student is to the English teacher,the more willing he/she will turn to the teacher for meaningful help.(3)The rural middle school students' English grades and teacher-student relationship together with academic help-seeking show correlations.Among them,the close and dependent types of relationship between teachers and students are positively correlated to instrumental help-seeking,while the conflict and avoidance of teacher-student relationship perform a negative correlation.That means the better the relationship between a student and his/her English teacher is and the more frequently the student turn to the English teacher for guidance,the better grades he/she will get;on the contrary,the worse the grade will be.Based on the findings of the research,some teaching suggestions are proposed to help improve the English language performance.Firstly,the English teacher should pay more attention to their relationship with the learners and make efforts to establish a harmonious interaction with their students.Secondly,the students' academic help-seeking should also not be overlooked.The teacher need to encourage them to turn to instrumental help-seeking when faced with learning difficulties.However,due to the singleness of the subjects and some subjective or objective influences during the conduction of the survey,this research might have its own limits and the results needs to tested in further study.