Abstract:

The purpose of the study is to evaluate changes in self-esteem of high and low achievers in two different students group in order to find out the relationship between self esteem and students’ achievement and proficiency this relationship may cause improvement in the learners' performance. The present study attempts to find answers to the following questions:

1. Do high achievers have higher self-esteem than the low achievers?
2. Is the influence of socio-economic factors help in improving self esteem in turn affecting the student’s performance?

Our objective in this study is to evaluate the level of self esteem and its effect on language proficiency. Also, the study further explored any improvement in the levels of self esteem and its effect on language proficiency with improvement in social attitudes, education, impact of TV and more tolerant attitudes of people for female liberalization.

Methodology: The subjects were 200 female English major students of session 2003-04 and 250 English major students of session 2008-09, ages ranging between 20-26 years.

Three types of instruments were used to collect data for this study: (1) two questionnaires, (2) a standardized English language proficiency test (Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency “MTELP”), and (3) a calculation of the grade point average (GPA) obtained by the students in specialized courses (i.e., major courses).

results: For batch 03-04, the mean of high achievers is 76.7 which is high and indicates positive self-esteem and the standard deviation is 3.4 whereas the mean of low achievers is 69.9 and their standard deviation is 4.8. For batch 08-09, the mean of high achievers is 79.9 which is high and indicates positive self-esteem and the standard deviation is 4.1 whereas the mean of low achievers is 72.4 and their standard deviation is 5.6.

The t-value for 03-04 batch is 6.9 and significance level is p=0.001. The t-value for 08-09 batch is 5.2 and significance level is p= 0.023. These results reveal that high achievers have higher levels of self-esteem than the low ones.

The data analysis results revealed that high achievers have positive levels of self-esteem at the 0.05 level of confidence (with a probability value of 0.001). High achievers group had positive levels of self-esteem than the low achievers group.

Keywords:

Self esteem, saudi learners, psycosocial factors, female education.