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On Chinese University Non-English Majors’ Vocabulary Strategies Use and English Self-efficacy

Author: LiCaiLin
Tutor: LiuShuLin
School: Jiangxi Normal University
Course: English Curriculum and Pedagogy
Keywords: English self-efficacy vocabulary learning strategies English performance
CLC: H319.3
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2005
Downloads: 406
Quote: 3
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Abstract

Self-efficacy, which is a central concept in Bandura’s social cognitive theory, refers to beliefs about one’s ability to perform any given task or behavior successfully. Students’ academic self-efficacy exerts significant influence on their learning success and personal qualities, and is a key factor of reference to be used in interpreting the complicated motivational activities of individuals. English is one of compulsive and very important subjects in Chinese universities. Students’ perceived abilities in English learning or performing English related activities is referred as English self-efficacy. Vocabulary learning plays a fundamental role in the acquisition of English language. Vocabulary learning strategies are specific behaviors, steps, techniques, methods or approaches that students use, often intentionally, to facilitate their progress in internalizing, storing, recalling and using the target language vocabulary. As a matter of fact, all the students will use some kinds of vocabulary learning strategies when they are learning vocabulary, whether consciously or unconsciously. English self-efficacy reflects the willingness of students to engage in English learning activities and how confident they are. Students cannot get much confidence in English learning supposed that they seldom employ some efficient learning strategies and sufficient learning skills to help their studies. So both ’will’ and ’skill’ in language learning are indispensable to students academic success. Being great producers of students’ English learning performance and important constitutes of self-autonomic learning, these two aspects should be received due focus from English teachers. University non-English majors need receiving more notice from English teachers in the process of improving their English performance and developing their favorable personalities. This project attempted to carry out a difference, correlation, and regression research in regard to vocabulary learning strategies and English self-efficacy of university non-English majors in the hope of getting significant results, thereby giving implications for teachers in the improvement of students’ English performance and personal qualities.In this research, a questionnaire about students’ vocabulary learning strategies use and English self-efficacy was administered. From two universities in Nanchang district, 215 university sophomores of non-English majors participated the study. In accordance with the research purpose, the following findings were obtained:1) Chinese university non-English majors employ a variety of strategies to helpthemselves learn and remember vocabulary, but the overall frequency of use of the strategies is relatively low. The popularity of vocabulary learning strategies used by non-English majors is listed as follows: rote memorization→selective attention→guessing → self-encouragement → dictionary look-up → association → translation → classification → context → extensive reading → self-surveillance → preplanning → exercise→self-evaluation→cooperation.2) Chinese university non-English majors have low self-efficacy beliefs about English learning. Even though most students hold positive views about their capabilities in English learning, they are not so confident in the learning outcomes they produced.3) Sex differences exist on the use of selective attention strategies and dictionary look-up strategies, with female students using these two types of strategies more frequently than male students do. But the differences between two sexes on the sense of English self-efficacy are not found.4) Significant and positive correlations are discovered among the use of vocabulary strategies and English self-efficacy. All the metacognitive strategies are correlated very significantly with English self-efficacy. And at the cognitive level, except rote memorization and translation strategies, all the strategies are correlated significantly with English self-efficacy. There are also significant relations between English self-efficacy and affective strat

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