A Study On High School Students' Perceptions Of English Learning Environment And Its Relationship With Their Achievements

For the teaching process,learning environment is a particularly important component,which plays a key role in students' learning.Learning environment not only affects students' behavior in many ways,but also affects the development of students' cognitive ability in varies aspects.At present,a lot of data and research results have pointed out that students' different perceptions of English learning environment have caused many differences among them,such as learning behavior,learning attitude and learning effect.Therefore,this study mainly focuses on the high school students' perceptions about their learning environment,and analyses and studies the importance of language learning environment in the process of English learning.259 senior 1 students from a high school in Jiangxi province participated in this study.Questionnaire,students' English achievements and interview are used to carry out the analysis and discussion with three objectives: first,the general situation of high school students' perceptions of English learning environment;second,the relationship between students' learning achievements and their perceptions of English learning environment and the distinctions between high-achievers' and low-achievers' perceptions of English learning environment;third,the predictive variable of the English achievements among the nine subscales of English learning environment.The following paragraphs are an overview of the main findings of this study.In general,the environment for learning English is regarded as a very important factor by high school students.In other words,they are positive about their learning environment.Among the nine subscales,the first three of students' perceptions are Leadership,Student cohesiveness,and Task orientation,followed by Student responsibility,Cooperation,Equity and Teacher innovation,the last two are Teacher support and Involvement.There is a positive correlation between high school students' achievements and their perceptions of English learning environment,that is to say,their perceptions of environment affect their achievements to some extent.Results reveal there are seven subscales that are significantly related to the learning achievements of students:Student responsibility,Leadership,Equity,Teacher innovation,Task orientation,Involvement and Teacher support,while the other two subscales,Cooperation and Student cohesiveness show no correlation with students' achievements.The data analysis also shows that there is no significant difference in the perceptions of Cooperation and Student cohesiveness between high-achievers and low-achievers in learning environment,but there are significant differences in the perceptions of other seven dimensions.In terms of students' perceptions of English learning environment,there exist nine subscales,among which Leadership and Student responsibility are the only two being used as predictive variables of learning achievements.The former one accounts for the variance of 12% and the latter accounts for the variance of 4%.In order to create a better environment for high school students in English learning,some proposals are given on the basis of the results.Firstly,teachers should do their best to provide students with English learning support and exert their influence in the classroom as far as possible;secondly,teachers should treat students equally and do not prejudice students because of their achievements;thirdly,in order to stimulate students' sense of learning responsibility,teachers should set good examples for students;fourthly,attention should be paid to the impact of learning tasks,and consideration should be given to students at all levels in the design of learning tasks.Finally,teachers should try their best to promote students' full participation in the classroom.