An Investigation Of The Relation Between Self-efficacy And Word Acquisition Achievement Under The Framework Of Autonomous Learning

Learner autonomy was first formally put forward by Henri Holec in1981. Ever since the birth of this notion, there have been numerous studies on it. But they mainly center on the definition of " learner autonomy ", the description and analysis of its theoretical bases and the strategies of its application, the learner strategies and application of those,and the autonomous learning strategy in aspects of listening, reading and speaking. However, the empirical studies in the area of autonomous learning in promoting the language study achievement are sparsely spotted, some researchers aboard have investigated the factors or accountability of autonomous learning and the theoretical synthesis of autonomous theory under the philosophy of learning. But the evidence of the language learning achievement under the framework of learner’s autonomy has rarely shown. The research of accountability of autonomous learning at different ages with different study level has been conducted by Zhan Xiao Long(2004) for non-English majors. His investigation surveys the word acquisition achievement based on the theoretical framework of learner’s autonomy, furthermore the self-efficacy of word acquisition was taken into account in experiments. With efforts this investigation discusses the relation of self-efficacy and vocabulary acquisition. This investigation aims to test the hypothesis that the students who have higher level of self-efficacy have better word acquisition achievement, if the self-learning autonomy and self-efficacy have positive relation with vocabulary acquisition, whether the hypothesis is vindicated, some suggestion of the vocabulary teaching method could be made, to improve the teaching effectiveness vocabulary teaching. Questionnaire surveys were done by junior college students on self-efficacy and self-learning autonomous report, the target vocabulary tests were taken as pretest and posttest taken after the instruction of autonomy fostering vocabulary learning. The groups were divided as HC class and LC class according to their self efficacy level, those whose scores below the average scores were grouped into LC group, students who got scores higher than average went to the HC group, the pretest result of target words collected as the initial word acquisition level are to make comparison of their final performance of students at different self-efficacy level. After a period of four weeks teaching practice, having undergone the process of the self-autonomy learning method fostering process and student centered curriculum, students were required to take the posttest of target words. The findings of the investigation are that the autonomous level and self-efficacy have positive relation with word acquisition level, students who have higher autonomous level have better word acquisition performance, the students who have higher self-efficacy make better acquisition performance. To improve the teaching effect of vocabulary, the teacher could adopt the way which fosters the students’autonomy and their self-efficacy in their teaching activities.