A Study On The Attribution And Transforming Strategies Of Students With English Learning Difficulty In Senior High School

At present,the problems from students with English learning difficulty have attracted more and more attention.Various factors and limitations are affecting students' learning outcomes in spite of their efforts.As the functions and social status of English are becoming more and more important,these students are facing enormous pressure from parents,teachers and classmates,which may bring students anxieties and fears in learning English.In the worst case,these students may even give up learning English totally which will seriously restrict the overall development of students.Helping students with English learning difficulty to identify their problems and transform their English learning has become one of the urgent issues for teachers and scholars.Attribution theory focuses on the process in which people form causal interpretations of the events around them in daily life and come to know their world.Positive attribution will bring students positive learning attitude and motivation while negative attribution will result in blaming outer causes for their failure in learning and neglecting their own efforts.Attribution theory is applied in the research to find out how students with English learning difficulty attribute their English learning so that the researcher can have a thorough understanding about their difficulties and thus effective transforming measures can be put forward accordingly.The subjects of this case study include 136 students with English learning difficulty from S school in Guangdong Province and questionnaire and interview are adopted to explore the following questions:(1)How do students with English learning difficulty in high school attribute their English learning?(2)What are the influencing factors teachers have on the attribution of English learning among students with English learning difficulty?(3)What measures do teachers often take to improve the learning of students with English learning difficulty?The results indicate that students with English learning difficulty mainly attribute their learning difficulty to the following causes:effort,learning method,interest,help from teachers and confidence.Effort and learning method are unstable,controllable and internal causes;Interest and confidence are stable,controllable and internal causes and help from teacher is unstable,controllable and external cause.Students with English Learning difficulty believe that their English learning is mainly influenced by controllable and internal factors and the influence of uncontrollable and external causes on their English learning is relatively small.What's more,teachers' teaching methodology,assessment,expectation,feedback and so on have influence on the attribution of English learning outcomes among students with English difficulty.As for teachers' guidance and help for students with English learning difficulty,English teachers are not clear about the learning difficulties among students with English learning difficulty and,therefore,teachers' measures to improve their English learning are limited and are not specially targeted.Based on the results,the author will put forward suggestions or strategies accordingly to help students deal with their problems.Hopefully,the proposals in this thesis can help teachers to arouse students' interest and confidence in learning English and provide students with suitable learning strategies.