A Study On English Learning Attitude Of Non-English Majors In Blended Learning Setting

The outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 made online learning become an important way of learning for all levels of universities in China,which has accelerated the vigorous development of information-based teaching.Combining the advantages of offline learning and online learning,blended learning is widely accepted in universities after the pandemic era.A structured questionnaire and interview were conducted to collect data in this survey.The questionnaire adopts the Tri-component Model of Attitude as the analytical framework,covering the range of students’ affective attitude,behavioral attitude and cognitive attitude.There were 3287 participants involved in the questionnaire.And 45 participants were interviewed to get more targeted and specific suggestions towards blended learning.The purpose of this research is to investigate students’ attitude towards blended learning,and find out whether there are some differences in the aspects of the independent variables like gender,grade,birth place and blended learning models.The study also aims to explore the potential factors which may affect blended learning,hence to provide feasible suggestions on educational reform and English teaching.The questionnaire data was processed by SPSS 25.0,which included the reliability and validity test,descriptive analysis and independent sample T test.The interview was analyzed by NVIVO 12 pro through the high-frequency words and their relevant collocations.The data indicates that,firstly,the students hold a positive attitude towards blended learning(M>3).Among the three components of students’ attitude,the affective attitude gets the highest mean value,which indicates blended learning has already gained wide recognition among the students.Then comes to the behavioral attitude,which proves the students can regulate their behaviors rationally in blended learning.The cognitive attitude gets the lowest mean value,the data indicates that the influencing factors,like network quality,learning devices,learning content and self-control ability affect the students’ learning attitude to some extent(M<3).Secondly,the individual factors like gender,grade and birth place have a significant difference on students’ attitude towards blended learning(p<0.05).The findings can be described as follows:(1)Considering gender,the male students’ attitude is significantly higher than that of the female students in the aspect of the affective and behavioral attitudes(p<0.01).(2)In terms of birth place,the urban students’ affective,behavioral and cognitive attitude are all significantly higher than that of the rural students(p<0.01).(3)As for grade,the sophomores’ behavioral attitude is significantly higher than that of the freshmen(p<0.001).However,in the aspect of teaching models,there is no significant difference on the students’ attitude towards blended learning between the control group and the experimental group,that is to say,the newly advocated teaching model plays no significant role on students’ learning attitude towards blended learning(p>0.05).Finally,the research surveys into the potential problems which exist in blended learning.Finding that classroom silence,perceived ease use of platform,teaching pace,in-depth learning,and network quality are the potential problems in blended learning.And based on these problems,practical suggestions on how to better carry out blended learning are provided in this study.