A Study On The Correlation Between Academic Emotion And Teacher Support Of Junior High School Students With English Learning Difficulties

Academic emotion,a very important element exerting great impacts on students' academic performance and mental health,refers to the learners' emotional experiences in the learning process.In recent years,with students' emotional and psychological development being more explicitly included into the New English Curriculum Standard(2011),academic emotion has attracted increasing attention from people.Students with learning difficulties are those who have difficulties in learning specific subjects.Owing to the complicated features of second language acquisition,comparatively more students are confronted with learning difficulties in English subject than in other ones in junior high school,hence more negative effects are caused on their academic emotion as well as their mental development.Previous studies on students' academic emotion were mostly focused on their internal environment with few on external ones,e.g.teacher support,an important external factor affecting students' academic emotion,especially for those with ELD(English learning difficulties).Till now,few researches were conducted to combine the academic emotion of students with ELD with teacher support.In view of this,this empirical study was undertaken to achieve a more complete understanding of the current situation as well as the correlation between the academic emotion and teacher support of junior high school students with ELD.This study aims to investigate the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation about the academic emotion of junior high school students with ELD?(2)What is the current situation about teacher support of junior high school students with ELD?(3)Is there any correlation between the academic emotion and teacher support of junior high school students with ELD? If so,how?To answer them,the study selected 130 students with ELD from three grades in Jinan No.14 Middle School as participants on basis of the three criteria pervasively adopted by most domestic researchers to define the students with ELD;Secondly,the data on academic emotion and teacher support were collected after questionnaires were completed;With the data acquired beinginputted to SPSS 19.0,a descriptive analysis was carried out to identify the current situation of academic emotion and teacher support;Variance analysis was implemented to investigate whether grades differences exist in academic emotion and teacher support;Correlation analysis was adopted to check whether the academic emotion and teacher support are correlated;Regression analysis was employed to test whether teacher support can predict academic emotion.Finally,the results are summarized as below.(1)The participants' current academic emotion is at a lower level,with more negative academic emotion than positive one.Low-grade students have more positive academic emotion while high-grade ones are contrary to that;There are statistically significant grade differences in positive high arousal,negative high arousal and negative low arousal academic emotion.(2)The current teacher support perceived by junior high school students with ELD is above the average level,but there is a big difference among dimensions.All three dimensions of teacher support decrease with the increase of grades and there are statistically significant grade differences in the dimensions of learning support and ability support.(3)Positive academic emotion is positively correlated with all three dimensions of teacher support,while negative academic emotion is the opposite;Moreover,it shows teacher support serves as a significant predictor of the academic emotion.Based on the findings above,a series of pedagogical implications are provided.In the end,limitations of the study are stated and suggestions for future research are also proposed.