The Study Of University Students' Self-attribution On Success And Failure In English Learning

Since the late 1950s, attribution has already become an important research topic in the field of psychology. In 1958, American social psychologist F. Heider published his famous book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which symbolized the birth of attribution theory. For his contribution, Heider was regarded as father of attribution theory in psychological circle. Following Heider's step, there were many other psychologists making contributions to this field, such as Jones and Davis, Kelly, as well as Weiner, the notable one who most widely applied this theory into practice. The development of attribution theory has undergone such a course, from the study of cognitive theory to the study of the results and influences of attribution theory, which is a process of uniting theory with practice.With the further development of attribution theory, the studies on it not only focus on all aspects in social life but also penetrate into all corners in educational field, such as students' unsuccessful studies, incorrect attitude towards study, as well as students' high psychological anxiety level. Attribution theory provides people a new horizon for handling these complicated problems. As is shown by second language studies, attribution is an important factor influencing second language acquisition, and it can have positive or negative effects on learners' motives (Qin Xiaoqing, 2002; Tremblay et al, 1995; William and Burden, 1999), and even spoil their learning results which are paid a good deal of attention to by teachers, students themselves as well as their parents.The present study adopts the questionnaire of Weiner's MMCS revised by Research Group for University Student's English Learning Condition (Jiang Xiaohong, 2002) to collect the participants' TEM4 scores and the information of their attribution profiles so as to master the overall learning conditions of the participants and study their general attribution tendencies. Based on the Syllabus for TEM4, the participants are divided into four groups: Excellent Group, Good Group, Pass Group and Fail Group. Owing to the absence of Excellent Group, only the attribution tendencies of the other three groups are explored. The overall conditions about the participants' studies are acquired through summarizing and analyzing their personal information along with their TEM4 scores. At the same time, the collected information concerning their attribution profiles are input into statistical software SPSS13.0 for windows, and the participants' general attribution tendencies and attribution tendencies of the three groups are summed up respectively. In order to make it clear that whether there are significant differences among these three groups One-Way ANOVA is adopted and Tukey HSD method is also selected and used to test where the significant differences exist. In view of the small sample number in Fail Group and with the purpose of ensuring the reliability and validity of this paper, an Independent Samples T Test is adopted to confirm the correctness of the outcome gained through Tukey HSD method. On the basis of the above analyses, it can be inferred that there exists relationship between the participants' attribution profiles and their learning proficiencies which is consistent with the previous studies.To sum up, the author hopes that this paper will offer recommendations to both teachers and students so that they can make joint efforts for the students to cultivate good habits of making reasonable reflections and attribution explanations together with understanding their English learning correctly. This will also have a driving effect on strengthening their active attribution, changing their passive attribution, and fostering correct learning attitude as well as finding sound and proper learning methods. Furthermore, by making teachers understand the students' attribution tendencies on learning, teachers' understandings about students learning and their teaching are strengthened. This will have a high significance for teachers to improve their teaching efficiently and get twice the result with half the effort of their teaching.