Moderating effects of self-efficacy on Chinese language achievement for minority students

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to explore the effect of the contextual variables and individual variables on the language achievement for the minority students in Chinese primary school. There were 9,102 students from grade 2 to grade 6 who participated in the investigation, including 578 minority and 4731 girls from five regions with different developing levels. Firstly, the results show that the ethnicity does not have a direct effect on the language achievement and the self-efficacy has moderating effect for ethnicity on language achievement. Secondly, the gender and parents’ career have a direct and indirect effect on the language achievement. Male minority students with lower parents’ careers level would have a high probability to fall in the language achievement. But, all these effects are moderated by the students’ self-efficacy. Finally, it implied that the early efforts to promote the students’ self-efficacy beliefs would enhance the future language achievement for the minority students in the primary school.