A Study On The Correlation Between English Self-efficacy And Learner Autonomy Of Senior School Students

With the establishment of people-oriented teaching philosophy, learner autonomybecomes research focus in the field of Education. Many linguists and scholars havealso done a great deal of research and discussions in the field of English teaching.Learner autonomy is recognized as one of the most important goals for Chinese seniorstudents by The New Curriculum Standard. As we could see, researches of Learnerautonomy both at home and abroad focus on definition, theoretical basis, ways oftraining, and necessity and feasibility analysis. However, researches of it are rarelydone from the perspective of emotional factors especially self-efficacy and most ofthese researches choose vocational school students and college students as subjects.Therefore, this research will focus on senior school students with the aims to find outthe current situation of their English self-efficacy and learner autonomy, the influenceof gender and learning achievement to them and finally get a deep analysis of thecorrelation between them.This research is done among students of a senior school in Jinan with thecombination of qualitative and quantitative methods and the two questionnaires ofEnglish self-efficacy and learning autonomy as research tools. The Statistical Packagefor the Social Sciences19.0is employed to manage, display and analyze data;independent samples T-Test, Pearson correlation, one-way ANOVA are applied.The results show that: Firstly English self-efficacy and learner autonomy ofsenior students are of mediate levels. Secondly, there is no significant genderdifference in self-efficacy and learner autonomy even though some dimensions ofthem differ on gender. Thirdly, the differences in both self-efficacy and learnerautonomy are significant on learning achievement. Finally, English self-efficacy issignificantly and positively correlated with learner autonomy. Among them, strategyusing is the most correlated with self-efficacy while goal setting the least and thecorrelation between performance efficacies and learner autonomy is more significant than that between ability efficacies and learner autonomy.Based on the findings and discussions above, the author tries to put forwardsome suggestions to enhance students’ self-efficacy and learner autonomy. Thesuggestions are as follows: becoming more confident teachers; providing studentswith opportunities to experience success; setting students appropriate peer models;instructing students to attribute in a proper way; arousing awareness of students andteachers; motivating students’ interests of English; carrying out strategy training;adopting new ways of evaluation. The author hopes that these suggestions could beuseful for these English teachers with their teaching and for students to enhance theirlearner autonomy.