A Case Study On The Causes Of A High School English Underachiever

Language teachers and scholars have been interested in the phenomenon of underachievement for quite a long time. Many researches were undertaken to explore the causes of English underachievement, the self-identification of the underachievers, as well as the comparison and contrast of the underachievers and the successful learners. However, a deep investigation on the causes of English underachievers has not been conducted ever.Given these facts, the study was conducted with a view to investigate the causes of a high school English underachiever and the interrelationship among the causes. This study adopted questionnaire and semi-structure interview as two main approaches to collect a high school student’s viewpoints on his underachievement in English. And will adopt the ground theory to analyze the data. Through these two approaches, this study yielded two major findings:To begin with, internal factors weight a lot in triggering underachievement in English learning, which include unawareness of learning strategy, lack of inner motivation and interest for learning English, the underachievers always have week willpower. Secondly, English underachievers would also be affected by the external factors, like the difficulty of the learning task, their family and the school and society environment. Two major implications can be obtained through these facts. For one thing, from the theoretical perspective, it might be possible that the causes of underachievement be divided into two parts:the internal factors and the external factors. And both them contain many different aspects. For another thing, from the practical perspective, teachers, parents and students may have a more comprehensive view of English underachievement and seek out ways to change it.However, due to the inadequacies of scope of questionnaire and scale of interview, further studies into English underachievers are required to conduct a research with larger scale of subjects and might concern much about the regional, area, and socio-cultural influences.There are five main chapters in this thesis altogether. In Chapter One, a brief introduction is given, including the background and the significance and the research questions of the study. Chapter Two highlights literature on English underachievers. The definition and related studies on the causes of English underachievement are addressed. The whole research design is presented in Chapter Three, including a brief description of the subject, the use of case study and narrative inquiry as the methodological framework for the research. Data collection and data analysis method will be elaborated in this chapter too. Chapter Four presents detailed data analysis of the study and suggestions of improving English underachievers’ study are given. Finally, a conclusion is made in the fifth chapter.