Abstract-This paper investigates 97 non-English majors' attribution preference of their English learning (including 52 female students and 45 male students) by using Weiner's attribution theory. All of the participants are from the Tianjin Polytechnic University (TJPU). According to the data, this paper discusses and analyses the new trends and features between the gender difference and students' attribution preference of their English learning. The results show that the female and male students' attribution preference are basically correct and reasonable and tend to be the same, but some problems still exist. Index Terms-English learning, attribution preference, gender difference I. INTRODUCTIONAttribution theory, as one of the new research topics in the contemporary psychology, is widely applied in the education, management and clinical practice in recent years. It can provide the theoretical basis to explain and infer people"s actions and the causality of activities. From the perspective of the foreign language education, the scholars in China have studied it in the following three aspects: (1). the research of students" self-attribution. (2). the research of the attribution training. (3). the attribution research of teachers" teaching. However, it is rare now that the study of attribution preference of male and female students (Zhang, 2007). This paper focuses on studying the attribution preference in non-English majors" English learning and whether gender differences exist between male and female students or not, which can offer the real and accurate information for teachers and the teaching practice, so that students" English learning can be improved effectively. II. LITERATURE REVIEW A. Attribution TheoryIt is very important for learners to explain his/her successes or failures about his/her learning from the cognitive point of view. This is because the learners" motivation of learning the similar things can be decided to some extent by how s/he gave the attribution explanation about his/her former results of learning. Attribution refers to people always attribute their successes or failures, perceived by themselves, to some certain reasons. In seeking to understand better the ways in which people make sense of events in their lives, the social psychologist Fritz Heider began to develop in the 1940s and 50s what he termed a "naive" psychology of the layperson (Heider, 1944(Heider, , 1958. A central aspect of Heider"s theory was that it was how people perceived events rather than the events in themselves that influenced behavior. When required to give reasons for the outcomes of events or the behaviors, Heider suggested that people would tend to refer to a limited range of internal (personal) and external (environmental) factors. Psychologist Bernard Weiner drew together Heider"s view of attribution and the theory of control, and he proposed his own influential version of attribution theory in 1970s
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