A Study Of High School Students’ Self-efficacy In English Reading

Self-efficacy concept was first proposed by American Psychologist Bandura in his social learning theory in 1977. Self-efficacy is defined as people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designed levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. In other words, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in performing a particular task. Bandura describes such a belief as a determinant of how people feel, think, behave and motivate themselves. As an important concept in current educational psychology, personality psychology and social psychology, the sense of self-efficacy has attracted widespread concerns and been researched and put into application,but in the foreign language teaching and research, especially high school students’ English reading self-efficacy, the related researches need to be further expanded and deepened.Reading is an important way of input in language learning, it plays an important role in improving learners’ language level. However, in the actual reading teaching, although the teachers and students have spent a lot of time and effort on English reading, reading achievement is still far from the ideal level. An important cause of this result is lack of the study of language learners’ reading self-efficacy. This study will discuss the status quo and characteristic of high school students’ English reading self-efficacy.This study will take 130 students of three different grades in Nanchang No.2 middle school as the research object; it is based on the way of literature analysis in combination with analysis of English reading self-efficacy questionnaire and an interview; and then discusses the status quo and characteristics of high school students’ English reading self-efficacy. The self-efficacy questionnaire data will be collected, and with the SPSS adopted to complete the sorting, data analysis and discussion, the main conclusions of the status quo and characteristics of high school students’ English reading self-efficacy are as follows:1 High school students have a moderate English reading self-efficacy; among the three aspects of English reading self-efficacy, sense of effort is high level, sense of competence and sense of set-back challenging are moderate level.2 There is no significant gender difference in high school students’ English reading self-efficacy and its three aspects.3 There is no significant grade difference in high school students’ English reading self-efficacy and its three aspects.Through this study, the writer hopes to provide useful references for the English reading teaching in high school to help students improve their reading ability and self-efficacy level. Due to the limited ability and time, the present study still has some shortcomings, the writer hopes the present study can provide helpful reference for the further correlational researches.