Effects Of English Majors’self-efficacy On Their Autonomy In English Learning

Learner autonomy is an active and instructive learning process, and self-efficacy is a key variable that affects the learner autonomy. Therefore, it is very important to explore how the self-efficacy affects the learner autonomy. This study aims to find out their relationship from the following three questions among English majors:(1) What is the present situation of English majors’ self-efficacy and learner autonomy?(2) Does English majors’ self-efficacy influence their learner autonomy? If yes, what kind of influence is it?(3) What are the sources of English majors’ self-efficacy?The subjects of the study are 54 English major sophomores in Qingdao University of Science and Technology. The quantitative and qualitative method are adopted in the study. The instruments include the authoritative English learning self-efficacy scale, English learner autonomy questionnaire and interview. The questionnaire takes the collective measured method, and SPSS17.0 is used to analyze the data. Then 10 of the subjects are randomly chosen to participate in the interview,helping the researcher to find out the efficient ways to improve their self-efficacy.Based on the data analysis and discussion, three major findings are concluded:(1) English majors have a high level general self-efficacy, but their self-efficacy of listening, speaking, reading and writing is lower; their learner autonomy level is high.(2) English majors’ self-efficacy influences their learner autonomy to some degree,and the correlation is positive. Students’ self-efficacy determines their effort in an activity, determination for the difficulty, and their adaptation in the negative environment. The higher their self-efficacy is, the stronger their effort, determination and adaptation are, and in this sense, the students will tend to learn autonomously.(3) The proper learning strategies, encouragement from teachers, appropriate learning goals and so on can help improve students’ self-efficacy. These findings provide some implications for the teaching and learning of English in the future.