Abstract:

Following the guidelines proposed by Weiner’s (1986) Attribution Theory, the current study is an attempt to identify high school learner's perceptions of their successes and failures in learning English. That students learning English language to what issues ─ source grammar, target grammar, dictionaries, text difficulty, interest, teacher or something else ─ attribute their perceived successes and failures would differ from culture to culture, having lots of consequence for language learners, and language teachers. The study, as an initial attempt in the context of Iran, aimed at: 1) identifying the factors to which high school students attribute their perceived successes and failures. To this end, the researcher used a validated questionnaire called ATFLL Questionnaire for identifying the factors to which high school students ascribe their perceived successes and failures in learning English. In so doing, a pool of 31 high school female students, majoring in Experimental Science and studying at Shahed high school in Ghucan, participated in this research work. The results from descriptive statistics revealed that high school students at Ghuchan Shahed attribute their perceived successes and failures more to intrinsic motivation (M: 4.10) and language policy (M: 3.73). The research work offers psychological and potentially useful implications for students to identify their beliefs about their successes and failures from a constructivism perspective, and try to attribute their failures to internal, unstable factors over which they have control. Moreover, it helps the teachers and syllabus designers to foster positive attitudes like self-efficacy, self-esteem, and a feeling of 'I can'.

Keywords:

attribution theory, individual differences, perceived success and failure.