A Correlation Study Of Junior Middle School Students’ English Autonomous Learning Ability And Attribution Theory

Ever since Holec proposed autonomous learning in the 1980 s, it has become a prominent topic both in the field of pedagogy and psychology and also becomes a new trend of foreign language teaching. What’s more, in process of studying the foreign language, Prof.Liu put forward that people have entered into the era of big data, when language education will undergo a fundamental change, mainly referring to the change of teachers’ role and learners’ role. Till now, there are lot’s of studies on autonomous learning. However, little has been known about the correlation between attribution and autonomous learning in the foreign language field. Attribution theory is a kind of behavior from the cognitive point of view. Active and reasonable attribution is conducive to correct studying self-perception, self-understanding, self concept of the formation of good self image(self-image), which will have a positive impact on the follow-up study, so as to succeed in the follow-up study.This thesis is an experimental study aimed to investigate the correlation between the two, and increase the effectiveness of language learning. It is carried out with the following three questions: 1) What is the overall situation of junior middle school students’ English autonomous learning ability? 2) What is the overall situation of attributions for junior middle school students’ success and failure in their English learning? 3) What is the correlation between students’ attribution in English learning and autonomous learning? Questionnaires and interviews are employed for study. The participants are junior middle school students from Experimental School affiliated with Zhejiang University of Technology. The SPSS(Version 13.0) software is used to collect data to obtain valid data.First, junior middle school students’ autonomous learning in language learning is generally low, and it is in accordance with students’ increased proficiency levels. Second, the learners have more tendencies to attribute their success and failure to internal factors like effort, strategy and interest. Participants with higher English level tend to attribute their success to internal factors more frequently than those with lower level. Moreover, the former group does not show statistically significant differences from the latter one in failure attribution. Third, English learners’ attribution and their learner autonomy are significantly correlated.In the light of the previous research, the present study presents some implications to enhance junior middle school students’ learner autonomy.