On The English Learning Burnout Of Rural High School Students

The American foundational clinical psychologist Freudenberger (1974) firstly put forward the conception of job burnout which has been given the greatest attention in the research of burnout in the past few decades. With the development of burnout research, some scholars have proposed that students also have burnout sense in their learning process. In the learning burnout researches of the foreign and Taiwan scholars, the subjects are college students, the research about high school students'learning burnout has just begun. Especially, the researches on English learning burnout (ELB) of rural high school students (RHSS) are rare. Because of the limited learning condition and English learning characteristics of the RHSS, the research has its own particularity. The present research aims to study the condition and affective factors of the RHSS'ELB in Xinhua County of Hunan Province, and then make some recommendations to abate this phenomenon.The author conducted questionnaires among 286 students of three rural high schools in Xinhua County of Hunan province. The first questionnaire was about the affective factors of SLA affective filter hypothesis—learning motivation and learning anxiety, the second questionnaire was designed from three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, inappropriate behavior and low efficacy to probe into the English learning motivation, anxiety and self-efficacy and other external factors which influenced the ELB. In the meantime, some students were interviewed individually.The results of the investigation indicate that the ELB level of the high school students in the rural area is moderate-high, the low efficacy gets the highest scores among three dimensions followed by the inappropriate behavior and the emotional exhaustion. And the ELB has a close relation with English learning motivation and anxiety, the ELB has negative correlation with the learning motivation, while anxiety influences the ELB positively. The other influencing factors of the ELB are gender, grade, self-assessed academic score and different schools. Moreover, the pressure of the National Matriculation Test (NMT) and the expectations of the parents and teachers also affect the students'ELB. Based on the results of the investigation, the author puts forward some coping strategies to alleviate the ELB of the RHSS.