An Investigation Into English Academic Engagement Of Senior High School Students

Academic engagement is an important measure to estimate students' learning and a significant index to track students' learning and predict their academic achievements;it plays an important role in estimating the quality of education and development of students.English academic engagement of high school students is negative and English academic burnout is prevalent among them.This thesis,therefore,is mainly to explore the current English academic engagement of high school students from three dimensions of cognition,behavior and emotion,and discusses their engagement differences existing in different groups of gender,grade and English scores.And based on the research results,this thesis puts forward some suggestions to encourage students' engagement and it would be valuable to improve students' learning.Questionnaires and interviews are employed to investigate English academic engagement of students at two senior high schools in Z County,Henan Province;and descriptive analysis and variation analysis are adopted to analyze the current situation and differences of engagement.In the end,the thesis makes some suggestions on how to stimulate students' English academic engagement.The main results are as follows:(1)The amount of English academic engagement is above average,which is reflected in the favorable behavioral engagement and emotional engagement;but the amount of cognitive engagement is below average,especially in meta-cognitive aspect(2)The gender of students influences engagement significantly and the engagement of female is significantly higher than that of male.(3)The engagement of students in grade two and three is significantly higher than that of students in grade one.The engagement of students in grade two is higher than that of students in grade three;but the differenceis not significant.(4)The higher one's English scores is,the more engagement one has.Based on the above results,this thesis puts forward following suggestions for improving English academic engagement of senior high school students.Firstly,it needs to strengthen the instruction of English learning strategies,especially the guidance of meta-cognitive strategies.Secondly,English teacher should pay attention to gender differences in English Teaching.Lastly,it is important to cultivate and maintain students' interest in English learning.