| Self-regulated learning (SRL) has been widely documented to be positively correlated with learning achievement or performance and crucial for one's future autonomous learning. The conceptual framework of SRL from social cognitive perspective formulated by Pintrich (2000) comprising phases (forethought, planning, and activation, monitoring, control, reaction and reflection) and areas for self-regulation (cognition, motivation, behavior, context) stresses learners'personally initiated learning activities, which are closely correlated with environmental and personal variables, designed to attain certain goals. This view is consistent with what Stern (1999:338) claimed about the role of social context, learner characteristics, learning conditions, in the individual's language learning outcome through the learning process. Thus, the hot topic in educational psychology is increasingly attracting the attention of researchers in the field of ELT in our country.SRL usually refers to the process whereby learners actively participate in their motivational, cognitive and behavioral aspects, the efficiency of which depends in part on two closely correlated factors, namely, motivation (will) and learning strategies (skill). Learning strategies in SRL model involve self-regulation in the areas of cognition, metacognition, and resource management (e.g., one's time and study environment, one's effort). It has been widely documented that good language learners show not only more frequent but also more effective use of learning strategies (Ellis 1999a, 1999b). As far as motivation is concerned, one of its important class is attributions, or beliefs about the causes of outcomes (Schunk, 1996).Weiner is the one of those who has made the greatest contributions to the theory of attributions (Pintrich & Schunk 2002). According to Weiner (1985, 1986, 2000), attributions may function as the link of thought-emotion-behavior: an individual's attributions for success or failure may influence his/her motivation for future learning through affecting the individual's emotion. He classified attributions into ability, effort, luck, and context in both success and failure situations, and proposed three causal dimensions such as locus of control (internal or external), controllability (controllable or uncontrollable), stability (stable or unstable), which resulted in his model of eight-cell, three-dimension attribution. And he claimed that it is one's beliefs in attributional dimensions rather than attributions themselves that affect one's emotion and motivation. Thus, it is necessary for learners to have adaptive attribuional beliefs that will facilitate their motivational behavior.This study, mainly based on Pintrich's (2000) model of SRL and Weiner's model of Attributions, examined the effects of the EFL learners'attributional beliefs on their SRL strategies and behaviors in senior high schools in Shanghai. The study was carried out by means of a three-part questionnaire, that is, achievement attributions scale, Leaners'self-conception of controllability of the attributional dimensions, and SRL learning scale. 235 Grade-One and Grade-Three students in Nanxiang Senior High School in Jiading District of Shanghai participated in the study with 211 being valid. The data obtained was analyzed by the SPSS (13.0) software. The results of data analyses revealed that the students'attributional beliefs, including their attributions and their perceptions of attributional dimension in terms of controllability, do influence their use of SRL strategies, and that different achievement attributions have different effects on self-regulated language learning behaviors.Based on the findings derived from the study, implications for ELT in senior high schools in our country are provided: how to help the EFL learners form adaptive attributional beliefs, and then motivate them to use SRL strategies more flexibly through the combination of attributional retraining and SRL strategies training.
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