Study On The Attitudes Of Higher Vocational Institute Students

Foreign language teaching and learning is an extremely complex process. It is far from teaching and learning the grammatical rules and the semantic meanings of the target language. Nowadays, more and more people are realizing that training the students in the interpersonal skills is essential. In their future work, students must master the technique of cooperating with the others because they will be thrown into the environment of the economic globalization and the situation that the information superhighway is far and wide. Seen from this perspective, the communicative competence demonstrates its immensely important function in English learning and teaching. This does tell us that English teaching and learning is interactive. Language itself is a system for the expression of the meanings which involves interaction and communication (Wang & Fu, 2001). However, many people traditionally hold the view that it is only the teachers who take the responsibility for creating the harmonious learning atmosphere and promoting effective learning. With the development of humanistic approach in psychology, it had the impact on educational and adjoining fields. Of course, it helped form the English teaching and learning theories such as constructivism theory, learner-center theory and learning autonomy theory. In accordance with these theories, the educational center is transferred from the teacher to the learners. In the last two decades, more and more teachers and researchers got involved in conducting English learning and teaching reform. They bear in mind that the main task of the reform is to eliminate the long-existing phenomenon: "high investment with low return". In order to respond to the "quality education", many teachers and educators try every possible method to upgrade the students' integrated ability in language learning and teaching. Recently, almost all the educators share an opinion that the focus of foreign language teaching and learning is on the students. That is to say, it is the students, not the teachers that should be put in the center of language learning and teaching. The students themselves should be responsible for their own English study. So, the students' individuality, strategies, learning habits and learning attitudes have got increasing concern. Learning attitudes construct the major and inner factor that influences learning achievements directly. Attitude, along with other affective factors such as self-esteem, anxiety, empathy and motivation, is tightly related to the second or foreign language learning (Brown 1994). From the constructivists' point of view, students actively construct their own knowledge (Meng, 2006). We can also infer that different attitudes lead to different results in learning. The biggest differences between people are learning attitudes. How people feel about their own learning plays a vital part in effective learning. A positive attitude is the key to the motivation and future success of the students because it can be helpful for them to be confident in study, set a goal, revise the learning behavior, manage to regulate the learning strategies and reflect on their progress. Attitude is a powerful factor in the second or foreign language learning. Of all the affective factors, attitude influences the students' learning process and learning outcomes most (Ellis, 1985). However, as we all know, in the past the researchers and the educators devoted themselves mainly to the attitudes of the general higher educational students while they neglected the attitudes of the higher vocational students. This thesis aims to study the learning attitudes of the higher vocational institute students.This research investigates 102 second-year students in Foreign Language Department of Wuhan Institute of Technology. A questionnaire survey is designed, distributed and collected to explore the students' learning attitudes. 8 students in Grade 2 are also inquired to take part in the interviews to make clear the reasons why their learning attitudes formed and the co-relationships between their learning attitudes and learning achievements. The social statistical analytical software SPSS 13.0 is employed to analyze the materials collected from the students' questionnaire. The interviews of the students are recorded and transcribed by the interviewer. According to both the quantitative analysis and the qualitative analysis, we have the impression of the true situation of the students' attitudes in English learning. We have found that students, as a whole, have positive learning attitudes. To be specific, they have both positive learning attitudes and negative learning attitudes in their English study. Even as for the same student, sometimes the positive learning attitudes gain the upper hand and some other times the negative learning attitudes prevail. Subsequently, the research also reveals to us that most of the students show positive learning attitudes in the higher vocational institutes although they do manifesto their different features. Through the research, we have apparently found that their learning attitudes are closely related to the family backgrounds, the educational degrees of their parents and other family members, the learning environment and the attribution to their previous success or failure. The learning attitudes and the learning achievements have the positive correlations. It means that, without the consideration of other factors, the more positive their learning attitudes are, the more effective their learning achievements will be. Some suggestions are given for improving teaching methods and converting the negative attitudes into the positive attitudes so that the effective learning outcomes are reached. Finally, the thesis puts forward the suggestion that some other ways should be found to train the students in order that they take more positive attitudes in their language learning and achieve optimal learning results.