Understanding the current study through attribution theory The rationale outlined in the previous section shows that there are two main

concerns informing the current study. One is the blame or criticism levelled at current teachers of English by principals, ELT resource personnel and retired teachers of English. These groups attributed the underperformance of students in learning English to a lack of effectiveness in English teaching. The other concern is the attribution of blame by current teachers of English in general in Jaffna as a response to the blame they received. As said in the introduction of this chapter the researcher during his English teaching experience in Jaffna found that the teachers of English in general became frustrated at the blame they experienced from others. Reacting to the blame directed at them, they in turn blamed various classroom problems that they claimed affected their teaching efficacy.

A question naturally arising here is why it is that while others attributed blame for the failure of students in learning English to factors internal to teachers (teacher effectiveness), the teachers themselves blamed external factors (classroom

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problems)? Another question also can be raised here particularly towards the principals and resource personnel of English: Why do principals and resource personnel blame the lack of effectiveness of the teachers in teaching English (which is external to them) instead of considering factors internal to them (which may also have contributed to students’ underperformance in learning English)? For example, a principal fails to provide necessary feedback (which is internal to him/her) to a teacher which is likely to result in poor teaching.

In the next section attribution theory is used to explore how people understand their own behaviours in relation to the outcome to their actions and also how people understand a person’s behaviours in relation to the outcome of that

person’s actions. Consequently this section explores why the current teachers of English blame causes external to them (rather than their teaching efficacy), and the principals, resource personnel and retired teachers of English blame the current teachers of English (rather than themselves) for the lack of English language proficiency amongst school students.

1.3.1 Meaning of the term attribution

Before understanding the basic tenets of attribution theory, it is useful to consider the meaning of the term attribution. ‘An attribution is a causal explanation for an event or behaviour’ (Harvey and Martinko, 2016: 147). For example if a nurse observes a colleague performing a procedure incorrectly on a patient, she is likely to make an attributional explanation for this behaviour. She might conclude that her colleague was poorly trained. Thus the nurse who is the observer attributes the behaviour of her colleague to having insufficient skills (ibid.). In the same

manner, people also form attributions for their own actions. For example, a student might attribute his or her success in an exam to his or her intelligence or hard work.

1.3.2 Attribution theory

Attribution theory was developed from the theories of social psychologists: Fritz Heider, Edward Jones, Keith Davis, and Harold Kelley. Heider first wrote about attribution theory in his book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships

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(1958) and the others worked on the theory in the following decades (Harvey and Martinko, 2016).

Attribution theory is about ‘how people come to explain the causes of their

behaviour and those around them’ (Amaral, 2011: 1) or ‘how people perceive each other in interaction and especially how they make sense of each other’s behaviour’ (Malle, 2011: 73). According to Malle (ibid.), Heider found that perceiving persons in social interactions was more complex than perceiving inanimate objects, because of the manifold observational data available and the various causes (e.g. beliefs, desires, emotions, traits) to which these data can be attributed. He perceived persons as action centres and said that they can intentionally benefit or harm others and they have abilities, wishes and sentiments. Heider argued that with the help of others’ intentionality, the inference of wishes, sentiments and purposes perceivers find meaning to others’ behaviours (ibid.). ‘Attribution is, therefore, a judgment embedded in the point of view of the perceiver and subject to the epistemic state [the knowledge about others’ behaviour] of that perceiver’ (Tomai and Forbus, 2007: 1).

Social psychologists developed attribution theory as a means of dealing with questions which required social perception. Hence its purpose is to know how people make causal explanations or how they answer questions beginning with ‘why?’ Heider (1958) explained this situation by arguing that ‘all people are “naïve psychologists” who have an innate desire to understand the causes of behaviours and outcomes’ (Harvey and Martinko, 2016: 148). Harvey and Martinko (2016) contend that, as the examples above suggest, the attribution process is something automatic and very familiar to people in their daily lives though they do not notice it and/or cannot account for their actions.

‘We’re constantly told we shouldn’t judge others. Attribution theory says we can’t help it’ (Griffin, Ledbetter and Sparks, 2014:137).

Heider (1958) made his first argument in social psychology that people tend to place more weight on internal reasons for success but place more weight on external factors when they fail.

This theory states that when an individual has a negative experience, or make a mistake, they will attribute the cause to something external. Others,

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however, will attribute the cause to something internal, something inherent in the individual’s internal locus of control (Amaral, 2011: 1).

Heider distinguished between internal and external attributions, arguing that both personal forces and environmental factors of people operate on them and the balance of these determines the attribution of responsibility (Lewis and Daltroy, 1990). For example, the principals, resource personnel of English language teaching (ELT) and retired teachers of English (who influenced my decision to undertake this doctoral study) attributed the causes of the underperformance of students in learning English to something internal to the teachers of English i.e., the teachers’ way of teaching the lesson was considered not effective.

However, as said above the researcher had a prior experience with the teachers of English in the educational contexts of Jaffna that they themselves attributed the causes for the underperformance of students to something external to them i.e., various classroom problems. Drawing on Heider it is possible to argue, that these teachers of English tended to place more weight on external factors (classroom problems) for their failure in teaching English to their students effectively. According to attribution theory many factors such as our view of the world, our prior experience with a particular person or situation, our knowledge of the behaviour and our own interpretation of events play an important role in how we assign attributes to behaviours (Heffner, 2014). For example, the principals, retired teachers of English and resource personnel of ELT referred to above, in order to make the correct attribution, needed to consider many factors related to the current teachers of English that may cause the low performance of their students’ learning of English. Harvey and Martinko (2016) state that ‘as with all perceptions, attributions are not always an accurate reflection of the reality!’ (p. 149 – emphasis in original). Heffner (2014) explains two kinds of errors or mistakes which people tend to make when assigning attributes to others and themselves: Fundamental Attribution Error (Heider, 1958) and Self-Serving Bias (Miller and Ross, 1975). These are discussed next.

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1.3.3 Fundamental Attribution Error and Self-Serving Bias

Buahin (2012) says that fundamental attribution error occurs when individuals overestimate personal factors and underestimate external or situational factors to explain others’ behaviour. This is supported by Heffner who contends:

Fundamental Attribution Error refers to the tendency to overestimate the internal and underestimate the external factors when explaining the behaviours of others. This may be a result of our tendency to pay more attention to the situation rather than to the individual and is especially true when we know little about the other person (Heffner, 2014: 1).

In self-serving bias, the person tends to equate successes to internal factors such as his or her ability or efforts and attributes failures to external factors (Heffner, ibid.; Sanjuan and Magallares, 2014). Hence self-serving bias helps individuals to give themselves credit for the good outcomes that happen (Buahin, 2012). According to attribution theory, in situations where individuals are themselves involved, they tend not to blame themselves for their failures but, rather, blame external factors. For example, a head teacher may not blame his/her poor leadership of his/her school for children not gaining the required qualifications, but instead blame the lack of student achievement on a lack of parental interest in their children’s performance. However, where the situation relates to others (i.e. when the head teacher focuses on his/her teaching staff), there is an over- emphasis on blaming others’ attributes when things go wrong rather than seeing that external factors are also implicated. For example, the head teacher will be quick to blame the teachers and/or over emphasise the weaknesses he/she attributes to the teachers when children fail their exams or results are lower than the year before, instead of trying to understand the external factors which have contributed to the students’ lower performance or underachievement.

Heffner’s explanation can be used to shed light on the behaviour of the principals, resource personnel of English language teaching and retired teachers of English in blaming the Sri Lankan teachers of English for their lack of effectiveness in teaching English. The former were inclined to blame the attributes of their own teachers when students failed to learn English well, rather than also pinning the blame on the relevant external factors (e.g. classroom problems and other related

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socio-economic and political problems) encountered by the latter. They tended to blame the teachers for children not learning English effectively instead of seeking to understand and blame the external factors which contributed to the difficulties encountered by the children in their acquisition of English.

Following Heider’s line of argument it could be argued that the educational authorities were predisposed to pay more attention to the situation of student performance rather than to the various classroom problems which the teachers faced as individuals. This is because schools locally and nationally are judged by student performance and student performance is used to compare schools and make judgements about the ability of teachers.

The current teachers of English attributed the failure of students in learning

English to some external factors, but did not acknowledge the contribution of their personal lack of effective teaching to the failure. This was a self-serving bias. However, what others especially the principals and resource personnel of English language teaching (ELT) attributed to themselves also reflected the self-serving bias. The principals and resource personnel of ELT have a part to play in the success of students in learning English as a second language. There are many factors which can contribute to the success of students such as proper teacher development, appropriate textbooks given to students, sufficient numbers of teachers being provided in schools through proper teacher deployment and so on. As long as these factors are managed by the principals, resource personnel of ELT and other authorities, they can be considered something internal to them.

According to self- serving bias of attribution theory, the principals and resource personnel of ELT attributed an external factor (lack of effectiveness in teaching English) to the failure of students instead of attributing any factors which were internal to them.

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1.3.4 Weiner’s attribution model

Among the psychologists who developed Fritz Heider’s study of attribution, Bernard Weiner is significant as he developed it into a more comprehensive and extensive model of human attribution. His model is more used in research on student learning (Anderman and Anderman, 2009). Weiner explains how learners form causal beliefs in matters related to their learning (Weiner, 2005, 2012).

A basic assumption of Weiner’s model of attribution is that learners are affected by both environmental factors (e.g., characteristics of the

students’ home or school) and by personal factors (e.g., prior experiences and prior knowledge). These background variables affect the types of attributions that individuals are likely to make (Anderman & Anderman, 2009: 1).

Learners make an attributional search when there is an achievement-related event such as failing in an examination. They search for the cause of their failure. The perceived cause is very important to the learners as it will affect their future motivation when they engage with similar events. For example a student who attributes his/her exam failure to his/her own lack of ability will have a different level of motivation in future examinations than the one who attributes his/her failure to inexperienced teachers (ibid.).

According to Weiner, four important factors such as ability, effort, task difficulty and luck determine the attributions we make (Weiner, 1986, 2012; Weiten, 2015). However, the characteristics (internal or external, stable or unstable etc.) of the attribution are more important than the mere attribution we make (effort, luck etc.). Weiner classified the characteristics of the attribution along three causal dimensions: locus of control, stability and controllability. These causal

dimensions are important as they affect learners’ subsequent motivation toward task or activity (Anderman and Anderman, 2009).

Locus of control (place of control) refers to one's belief that his or her behaviour is guided by external (such as luck, fate, etc.) or internal (such as ability and effort) factors (Fiske and Taylor, 1991). If a learner attributes his/her success in an exam to his/her ability or effort, then he/she chooses an internal cause because the ability or the effort is internal to a learner. However, if he/she believes that his/her failure is due to his/her teacher’s incompetence, then he/she attributes

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his/her failure to an external cause, because his/her teacher’s incompetence is external to him/her (Anderman and Anderman, 2009).

Stability refers to how likely it is the probability of causes will change over time (Fiske and Taylor, 1991). For example, a male student failed his math test, but he attributed the failure to his illness during the exam. The student might consider this situation unstable because his illness is a temporary cause. In contrast, if he failed because of his lack of ability in math, then his cause is stable (if he believes that his ability is a permanent quality) (Anderman and Anderman, 2009).

According to Weiner, stability is directly related to one's expectancy for success (Weiner, 1986).

The final dimension of Weiner’s (1986) model, which is controllability, explains about the control of a person over the situation. A person may have little control over the situation, or the situation may be in the person’s control (Fiske and Taylor, 1991). If a runner thinks that he/she lost the race because of a lack of practice before the competition, the cause is controllable because he/she could have practised more. In contrast, if he/she believes that the loss was due to the lack of ability as a runner, then the cause is uncontrollable (Anderman and

Anderman, 2009). Control influences one's affect (or feeling/emotion) toward the situation or behaviour. Hence, the runner who lost the race because of their lack of ability may not make time to practice well for the race in the future as he/she perceives the situation to be unchanging and uncontrollable, and wonders why he/she should be bothered unnecessarily (Hurst, nd).

Weiner’s model can be explained further through figure 1 below. Ability is considered an internally perceived locus but out of the control (or permanent) of the individual. For example, one may think he or she was born with the ability to be a good dancer and another may think he or she can never sing well because they do not have the talent for singing. Task difficulty is also attributed as no control, but is perceived as external as it is assigned by someone outside. Effort and luck are perceived as unstable (or temporary) while the former is internal and the latter is external.

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Figure 1: Weiner’s (1986) original attribution model

Internal

External

Stable Unstable Stable Unstable

Uncontrollable

Difficulty

Luck

Controllable

Weiner’s model also indicates that certain emotional responses are associated with various causal dimensions (Weiner, 2006). For example, in relation to the locus dimension, a student is likely to experience a sense of pride in passing their exam if he/she believes that the cause is due to his/her internal behaviour (e.g. effort) or experience relaxation when the success is attributed to some external causes (e.g. luck). In relation to the stability dimension, people may have feelings of

hopefulness or hopelessness. Where there is success because of ability which is internal to a person, the person is hopeful about future success. However, when failure is attributed to the difficulty level of the task which is external to the doer, he/she becomes hopeless about future success. In the controllability dimension, a student may experience guilt if he/she believes that his/her failure was caused by a controllable factor such as lack of effort or is likely to experience the feeling of shame if his failure was due to an uncontrollable cause such as a lack of ability (Anderman and Anderman, 2009).

Finally, Weiner’s model posits that the people who undergo this attributional process may have behavioural consequences in them. For example, a student’s decision to study science harder in future may be partially determined by their attribution for failure on previous science examinations (Anderman & Anderman, ibid.).

Though Weiner’s model of attribution is primarily associated with students’ motivation and learning, it can be drawn on to help explain the problem of the current study which is mainly related to Sri Lankan teachers of English teaching

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efficacy. Thus the success or failure of students in learning English can be related to the ability or the efforts of the teachers as students’ performance in the exam is related to their ability or efforts. Further Weiner’s model can also explain

emotional responses of the teachers of English following their success or failure in teaching English to their students. It is also possible to explain the behavioural changes of the teachers of English following the attributions they make for their behaviours.

Given that blame is central to the arguments posed by the principals, retired teachers of English and resource personnel of ELT, and a number of factors can contribute to student failure and not just a lack of teacher effectiveness it was considered salient to provide an overview of attribution theory in this first chapter as it is offers insight into how and why teachers might be blamed for poor student performance. The relevance of attribution theory to the current study particularly based on the Weiner’s model will be further discussed in Chapter Seven when the findings of the main study are analysed.