A Study On The Relation Of High School Students’ Learned Helplessness And Attribution In English Learning

Learned Helplessness refers to the negative and unusual psychological phenomenon of an organism in terms of emotion,cognition and behavior after repeated exposures to adverse events.Learned Helplessness occurs when students perceive that they have little or no control over failure in English learning.Not all students who go through repeated failure would develop helplessness,but they would all tend to make inferences on the cause to understand their experiences.Such behavior is called Attribution which refers to the subjective reasons and explanations given by students for why they have failed or succeeded in a given task in English Learning.Student’s Attribution on success and failure would then alleviate or aggravate their Learned Helplessness.English learning for senior high school students is both important and difficult,and their attribution of success and failure in English learning can be guided by teachers.Thus,the significance to understand the relation of senior high school students’ Learned Helplessness and Attribution is beyond words.After reviewing some major researches on Learned Helplessness and Attribution at home and abroad,two questionnaires: Learned Helplessness questionnaire and Attribution questionnaire were distributed to 125 participants in a senior high school to investigate the following questions:(1)General situation of high school students’ Learned helplessness and Attribution in English learning.(2)Correlations among Learned helplessness,Attribution and academic achievement.(3)Attribution’s predictive effect on Learned Helplessness.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:1)Senior high school students’ Learned Helplessness in English learning is at a relatively low level on the whole,and students’ tendency of helplessness is not obvious.The four dimensions of Learned Helplessness from high to low are emotional helplessness,behavioral helplessness,cognitive helplessness and motive helplessness.About Attribution,senior high school students’ negative attribution in English learning is at a relatively low level,and the negative attribution tendency is not obvious.When allocating causes to success,students’ attribution tendency from highto low are: luck attribution,ability attribution,effort attribution,situation attribution.When allocating causes to failing events,students’ attribution tendency from high to low are: ability attribution,effort attribution,situation attribution and luck attribution.2)There is a significantly negative correlation exists between Learned Helplessness and academic achievement.In other words,the higher level of students’ Learned Helplessness is,the lower their English performance will be or the opposite way.A significantly negative correlation exists between Attribution and academic achievement.That is to say,students with higher negative attribution tend to have lower English performance and vice versa.Learned Helplessness and Attribution have a significantly positive correlation.More specifically,the higher level of negative Attribution senior students have in English learning,the higher students’ Learned Helplessness will be or the other way around.3)Attribution has predictive power on Learned Helplessness.Among the four dimensions of Attribution,Ability Attribution has the strongest predictive power on Learned Helplessness followed by luck and effort Attribution.Only situation Attribution has no significant predictive power on Learned Helplessness.Several pedagogical implications for English language teaching are recommended on the basis of these conclusions.Furthermore,there are some limitations of this study and suggestions for future research on Learned Helplessness and Attribution in high schools.