A Study On The Relationships Among Senior High School Students’ Perceived English Teacher Support, Academic Self-efficacy And Student Engagement

As a predictor of academic achievement,student engagement has drawn wide attention.Student engagement refers to a continuous and energetic state in the process of learning.Engaging in learning actively is conducive to improving academic achievement.Existing research have indicated that student engagement is affected by internal and external factors.Self-efficacy and teacher support are the internal and external factors of student engagement respectively.However,a large number of previous studies have only explored the impact of one aspect on student engagement.Prior studies taking into consideration the impact of both self-efficacy and teacher support on learning engagement are scarce,and the effect mechanism among the three variables needs to be further explored.In addition,most of the previous studies have been conducted based on the overall learning situation,and the studies exploring the relationships among teacher support,self-efficacy and student engagement on the basis of English discipline are limited.This study took students from Grade 1 and Grade 2 in a county senior high school in Sichuan Province as the research subjects,explored the relationships among students’ perceived English teacher support,academic self-efficacy and student engagement and answered the following three questions:(1)What are the current situations of senior high school students’ perceived English teacher support,academic self-efficacy and student engagement?(2)Are there any differences in senior high school students’ perceived English teacher support,academic self-efficacy and student engagement in terms of demographic variables?(3)What are the relationships among senior high school students’ perceived English teacher support,academic self-efficacy and student engagement?This study adopted quantitative and qualitative research methods.At first,320 senior high school students participated in questionnaire survey and 7 students accepted interviews.Then,SPSS 22.0 and Amos 22.0 statistical analysis software were utilized to analyze quantitative data.Finally,the following findings were drawn:(1)Senior high school students’ perceived English teacher support was at a high level;both academic self-efficacy and student engagement were at a medium level.(2)There were significant differences in perceived English teacher support in the respect of gender,grade and whether students were class cadres or not.Specifically,female students’ perceived more English teacher support than male students’,students in Grade 1perceived more English teacher support than students in Grade 2,and class cadres perceived more English teacher support than students who were not class cadres.Similarly,significant differences also existed in the academic self-efficacy in the respect of gender,grade and whether students were class cadres or not.Specifically,female students had higher academic self-efficacy than male students,students in Grade 1 had higher self-efficacy than students in Grade 2,and the class cadres had stronger academic self-efficacy than students who were not class cadres.In addition,there were significant differences in student engagement in the respect of gender and grade.To be specific,female students had a higher degree of student engagement than male students and students in Grade 1 engaged more in English learning compared to students in Grade 2.However,no significant difference existed in student engagement in terms of class cadres and non-class cadres.(3)Significantly positive correlations existed among students’ perceived English teacher support,academic self-efficacy and student engagement.Besides,both learning ability self-efficacy and learning behavior efficacy had mediation effect on the relationship between students’ perceived English teacher support and student engagement.Based on the background of English discipline,this study is designed to clarify the internal relationships among students’ perceived English teacher support,academic self-efficacy and student engagement.The results of this study have following implications for English teaching.On the one hand,it enables English teachers to have a clear understanding of student engagement in senior high school English learning and recognize the students’ differences in perceived teacher support,academic self-efficacy and student engagement among students,so as to provide base for English teachers to design teaching activities.On the other hand,it can make English teachers attach importance to the influence of teacher on students and provide enough support for students,so as to help students form a higher sense of academic self-efficacy and promote students to participate in English learning actively.