The Influence Of Achievement Motivation And Attributional Beliefs On EFL Learning

Achievement motivation and attributional beliefs are two most important factorsin English learning. The achievement motivation of students is an inner driving forcewhich impels the learners to try their best to achieve the success in learning. It hasclose relation with the learner’s academic performance. While learning attributionrefers to the learner’s explanation to their success and failure in study. It has influenceon the students’ learning emotion, motivation and the expectation of the comingsuccess, thus can affect their behavior.The Quantitative research was adopted in this study. The subjects involved were459students of non-English majors from five universities in Xi’an. They weredivided into two groups: strong learners and poor learners according to their CET-4scores. Two major questionnaires: Achievement Motivation Scale (AMS) and TheMultidimensional-Multiattributional Causality Scale (MMCS) were administrated tocollect information on students’ achievement motivation and attribution, and checktheir correlation with students’ English performance (CET-4). The results aresummarized as follows:1. Regardless of the English performance, the motivation of success-pursuing ofthe non-English majors was higher than failure-avoiding; the total and the successdriving achievement motivation of the strong learners were higher than those of thepoor learners.2. The success driving motivation of the non-English majors could predict theirperformance in English learning. There was a significant positive correlation betweensuccess driving motivation and English scores, but no significant correlation betweenthe failure driving motivation and students’ English learning.3. Regardless of achievement level of English, non-English majors tended toattribute their success and failure of English learning to the inner and unstable factors.The strong learners were more likely to attribute their success to effort and failure toouter factors, while the poor learners were more likely to attribute both their successand failure to inner factors. 4. Effort and success-situation had the greatest impact on English learningamong the four attributional factors. What is more, effort attribution and Englishperformance turned out to be a positive regression, while the success-situationattribution and English performance demonstrated a negative regression. The resultsof correlation analysis showed that learners attribute success to the inner factor butfailure to the outer and unstable factor as lack of effort or luck would help improvetheir English performance.