A Study Of Non-English Major Graduates' Attributions Of Their Success And Failure In ELL

Attributions are the perceived reasons of our own and others'behaviors which can be categorized into three dimensions: the locus of causality, stability and controllability. This thesis aims to make an investigation into Chinese non-English major graduates'attribution in ELL with the purpose of improving both the learning and teaching of graduates'English learning.The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The research started with an interview of 12 non-English major graduates for a general understanding of their attribution orientations. Based on the attribution theory and the interview, the author conducted a questionnaire named Self-Attribution Scale on Success and Failure in English Learning containing 38 items.In this thesis, a brief introduction to the background of the study is presented first. The second part is the literature review, with the focus on the definition of attribution, the introduction to Weiner's attribution theory and a summary of studies on attribution at home and abroad. This is followed by a detailed description of research questions and research methods, including the subjects, the development of the questionnaire and the data collection procedure. The forth part is the kernel part of the thesis. In this part, the results of the interview are discussed to obtain a comprehensive understanding of graduates'attribution orientation, and then all the data collected are analyzed statistically with SPSS Statistics 17.0 Software. To deeply investigate the causes of graduates'success and failure in English learning, the mean value and the mode of each item are analyzed respectively. Exploratory factor analysis is then conducted to extract factors of the subjects'success and failure attribution. At the end, a comparison of the mean value of items is carried out to study the difference between successful and unsuccessful learners'attribution. The last part reaches a conclusion about the main findings as well as the implications for future teaching and learning. The limitations of the present research are also given in the last part.The main findings of the research are summarized as follows: 1) there are more self-evaluated unsuccessful English learners than successful English learners among non-English major graduates, and their self-evaluation is made on the basis of the comparison between their current academic performance and previous achievement; 2) non-English major graduates tend to ascribe their success and failure in ELL to five major factors, namely, personal effort, interest, language aptitude, English teacher and future orientation; 3) for successful learners, personal effort is the most important cause for their success, followed by interest, future orientation and confidence, while for unsuccessful learners, the major factors are future orientation, interest, personal effort and teacher.Graduates are suggested to attribute their learning achievements more to adaptive and positive factors than to maladaptive and negative ones to make progress in English learning.