Relationships Between Parenting Styles And Learned Helplessness In English Learning Among Senior High School Students

English subject is an important humanities subject in senior high school education.To learn English well is not only an important thing for students themselves and their teachers,but also for parents who are also aware of the importance of learning English well for their children's learning and development.In the teaching of English,we often find that many parents are annoyed for their children having bad performances on learning English,and they are trying to find ways to help their children.Parents' attitudes towards their children's English learning problems are not the same.Their attitudes can influence their children's attitudes towards English learning problems to a certain extent.Learned helplessness refers to a special negative state of mind that occurs after unconscious learning acquired by an individual who suffered from long-term and repeated failures.It includes cognitive,emotional,motivational,and behavioral helplessness.In senior high school,there are quite a few students who have English learning problems.Many students are not interested in learning English.They dislike,fear,and even give up English learning,but they didn't perform so negatively at the very beginning of learning English.This kind of negative mental state appearing in the English learning can be defined as "learned helplessness in English learning".Through literature review,it is found that many studies focus on the relationship between learned helplessness and attribution styles,ignoring the influence of parents on the growth of students.Thus,this paper attempts to study the present status of PS and LHEL and the relationship between them.The aim of this paper is to discuss the following three questions:(1)What's the general picture of the PS among these senior high school students? And what about the LHEL of them?(2)Are there any differences between male and female students in terms of PS and LHEL?(3)Is there any relationship between PS and LHEL? And of so many factors in the students' parenting styles,which may be the most influential predictor(s)of their LHEL?The participants of this study were 160 students from a senior high school,in which 80 were boys and 80 were girls.Quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed to collect data for the research.Two questionnaires were used to understand parenting styles and learned helplessness in English learning respectively,and 6 students were interviewed in depth to provide supplementary data forquantitative data.The data collected were analyzed with SPSS 17.0,and the interviews were analyzed qualitatively.The results of the study can be summarized as follows:1.Senior high school students do not get enough emotional warmth and understanding from their parents.Parents' attitude towards children tend to be more denying and critical about their children;while students have a mid-level of learned helplessness in English learning,and there are great differences among students.Among those four factors of learned helplessness in English learning,motivational helplessness scores the highest,followed by behavioral and emotional helplessness,and the last one is cognitive helplessness.2.Gender differences in PS mainly show in the following aspects: father tend to be stricter with males than females,male students are more likely to be punished and denied by their fathers.While mothers are more likely to interfere with male students in the process of upbringing;In addition,there were significant gender differences in LHEL,especially in behavioral learned helplessness.3.On the one hand,correlations between fathers' parenting styles and LHEL:father's emotional warmth and understanding and learned helplessness in English learning have a strong negative correlation;father's severe punishment and excessive interference have a slightly positive significant correlation with learned helplessness in English learning.In addition,father's rejection and denial factor was found to have a strong positive correlation with learned helplessness in English learning.On the other hand,correlations between mothers' parenting styles and LHEL are as follows: mother's emotional warmth and understanding have a negative correlation with learned helplessness in English learning;mother's rejection and denial factor was found to have a strong positive correlation with learned helplessness in English learning;What's more,mother's severe punishment has a slightly positive significant correlation with learned helplessness in English learning.Of so many factors in the students' parenting styles,father's rejection and denial factor and father's excessive protection factor can jointly explain 16.3% variance of learned helplessness in English learning.While mother's rejection and denial factor can explain 8.7% variance of learned helplessness in English learning.Based on the results of the study,the author put forward some suggestions on helping parents to choose the appropriate parenting ways when they face with their children's English learning problems,which aims to help senior high school students to eliminate the learned helplessness in English learning caused by inappropriateparenting styles.Meanwhile,the limitations of the thesis are pointed out in the conclusion part.