A Study Of The Relationship Of Perceived Self-efficacy, Self-attribution And Academic Performance In English For Hish School Students

The paper illustrates how one’s self-efficacy, self-attribution interplay with one’s academic achievements in English for high-school students. In language teaching, according to Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, if a student’s self-efficacy is enhanced, he is more likely to devote himself in the face of difficulties and persist longer. Even if he has failed, he tends to attribute the failure to some controllable factors, whereas a person with low self-efficacy tends to attribute it to uncontrollable elements under the guidance of Wiener’s attribution theory.To elaborately examine this study, this paper seeks to investigate students’ language self-efficacy and attribution styles by means of a sample of90high-school students from Affiliated Middle School of Tianjin University. They were asked to finish two questionnaires of self-efficacy and self-attribution respectively, which were adapted from original questionnaires composed by Pintrich&DeGroot (1990) and Guo Hengjie. Questionnaire of Self-efficacy, composed of11items which were translated into Chinese so as to be better understood, is rated on a5-point Likert-scale, which are ranging from strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree with it, to neutral about it. Questionnaire of self-attribution is composed of16items. Just as questionnaire of self-efficacy, each question is rated into five categories, but choosing "strongly agree", a student will get2points,"agree"1point,"neural about it"0point,"disagree"-1point, and "strongly disagree"-2point. By the use of SPSS (17.0), combining descriptive statistics, Independent-Sample T-test, one-way ANOVA, and correlation analyses, the author analyzed the data collected from the respondents in the form of3categories of correlations:correlation between perceived self-efficacy and academic performance, correlation between self-attribution and academic performance, and correlation between perceived self-efficacy, self-attribution and academic performance.The results revealed that a student, with a higher self-efficacy and accustomed to attributing his achievement to some controllable, unstable and internal factors, is more likely to obtain a higher achievement on English learning. The findings of this study also provide some useful insights into English teaching. In practice, teachers need to be aware of enhancing students’ senses of self-efficacy and guide them to correct self-attributions by means of attribution trainings.