The Relationship between English Grammar Skills and Motivational Attributions : A Study of University Students in Finland and Hong Kong
Tallila, Neea (2018-05-07)
The Relationship between English Grammar Skills and Motivational Attributions : A Study of University Students in Finland and Hong Kong
Tallila, Neea
(07.05.2018)
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Turun yliopisto
Tiivistelmä
In this thesis, I studied the relationship of English grammar skills and motivational attributions. People usually try to find causes for their past successes and failures no matter what they have done. Bernard Weiner’s Attribution Theory focuses on analysing these attributions that people have for their past actions. According to the theory, the attributions can be internal or external, stable or unstable, and controllable or uncontrollable. My purpose in this study was to find which attributions are the most common in explaining success in English grammar among university students. I also examined if there are differences between two different groups of subjects, and if the attributions are different for the students who received low scores and the ones who received high scores from the English grammar test.
The study was quantitative and it consisted of a questionnaire which had two parts. The first part was a motivational questionnaire which focused on motivational attributions related to grammar learning. The second part was a short English grammar test. I had 89 subjects, of which 49 were Finnish university students of English, and 40 were Hong Kongese university students. The most common attributions were effort and having a good teacher, and both of the groups explained their success mostly with internal causes.
The results showed that the two groups attributed their success slightly differently. For example, the Finnish subjects trusted more in their own abilities and they paid more attention to other people’s grammar use than the Hong Kongese subjects. These results could be explained by the fact that the all the Finnish subjects were English students, but only part of the Hong Kongese subjects studied English at the university. In addition, there were clear differences in the motivational attributions between the subjects who got low scores from the grammar test and those who scored high points. The lowest scoring group’s answers were not very coherent, but it could be seen that they felt less confident about their grammar skills than the highest scoring group.
The study was quantitative and it consisted of a questionnaire which had two parts. The first part was a motivational questionnaire which focused on motivational attributions related to grammar learning. The second part was a short English grammar test. I had 89 subjects, of which 49 were Finnish university students of English, and 40 were Hong Kongese university students. The most common attributions were effort and having a good teacher, and both of the groups explained their success mostly with internal causes.
The results showed that the two groups attributed their success slightly differently. For example, the Finnish subjects trusted more in their own abilities and they paid more attention to other people’s grammar use than the Hong Kongese subjects. These results could be explained by the fact that the all the Finnish subjects were English students, but only part of the Hong Kongese subjects studied English at the university. In addition, there were clear differences in the motivational attributions between the subjects who got low scores from the grammar test and those who scored high points. The lowest scoring group’s answers were not very coherent, but it could be seen that they felt less confident about their grammar skills than the highest scoring group.