Getting inside the mental lives of students: Learned helplessness, problem solving skills and lifelong learning tendency in EFL context

Human learning is multi-dimensional and progressive in nature, and it lasts a lifetime, getting influenced through a variety of elements. Students' own mental lives, one of those elements, nurture and complete this process since students' standpoints pertinent to learning can give a certain shape to their own learning and provide insight into their stance as language learners. Therefore, it is of great importance to deal with student thinking in learning process, which embodies both problems and solutions within itself. Since it is difficult to separate this process from learned helplessness, problem solving skills and lifelong learning tendency, this study dwells upon the interaction among these variables. The participants of the study were university students from different departments and they were selected via "Purposive Sampling". 35 students from first, second, third and fourth years at university participated in the study. The data were gathered through 14 different instruments, including a series of both open-ended and close-ended questionnaires, scales, autobiographies, grid tables, critical incidents, situation-based scenarios and interviews. The collected data were analysed in two terms. That is, the scales administered to the students were analysed through SPSS and the other data gained in an open-ended fashion were subjected to content analysis. In this respect, this study bore both quantitative and qualitative features. The study elicited two groups of students with and without learned helplessness. Both groups were identified to attribute success and failure in learning English to different factors. However, students with higher tendency to learned helplessness attributed success to review and good educational background, and failure to lack of self-evaluation and not viewing English as necessary, which were found to be statistically significant. Moreover, both groups were detected to consult to coping strategies in case of an academic failure; however, students with more tendencies toward learned helplessness were found to have higher coping scores even though it was not statistically significant. In contrast, students without learned helplessness were ascertained to have a higher inclination to lifelong learning, which was seen to be statistically significant. As for the relation between these notions, learned helplessness was established to have a positive but weak correlation with problem solving skills. However, learned helplessness was detected to bear a negative and medium level correlation with lifelong learning propensity, which was found to be statistically significant. Accordingly, it was identified that a decrease in learned helplessness predicted lifelong learning tendency in a statistically significant manner. Furthermore, interview results shed light into the students' own perceptions on the reasons of belief in inability to learn English, the interaction among learned helplessness, problem solving skills and lifelong learning disposition, and indicated that university education had a positive influence on their problem solving and lifelong learning inclination for some students. Keywords: Learned helplessness, problem solving skills, lifelong learning tendency