In China, most primary school students begin to learn English as a foreign language (EFL) in the first grade. English is a compulsory course for Chinese undergraduate students. However, the online survey report on English education in China [
1], which was conducted by the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Bei**g, showed that children who were interested in English accounted for only 10.62% of the total. Besides an intellectual interest in language skills, achievement in a target language depends primarily on psychological factors. In the case of many people, the learner’ attitudes towards the target language (L2) and the target community (L2 speakers), such as feelings, beliefs, likes, dislikes, needs, are viewed as psychological construct and impact on L2 learner success in L2 acquisition [
2,
3,
4].
A large number of studies on language attitudes have been conducted over the past 50 years because of the growing relation between the importance of language use and the nature of individuals, such as students’ attitude toward different teaching strategies [
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12], students’ attitude towards reading [
13,
14], writing [
15] and Utilization of iPad [
16], relationship between attitudes and motivation [
17,
18]. In his great work “Principles of Language Learning and Teaching”, Brown (1994) [
19] stated that “attitudes are the result of parents’ and peers’ attitudes, contact with people who are different in any number of ways, and interacting affective factors in the human experience”. It seems obvious that, in many cases, there are many factors, including social and psychological factors, educational background, positive feelings and career aspirations, that lead to a positive or negative attitude towards the target language. Pienemann and Johnston (1987) [
20] came up with a distinction between factors which are “external” and “internal” to the learner. External factors are variables ranging from social environment, and biological factors such as age. Internal factors are described as aspects of the learner’s cognitive and linguistic capacities and the mental structures which determine these capacities. Spolsky (1989) [
21] refers to four groups of factors (Kp, A, M, O) as necessary conditions for any effective second language learning. “A” factors represent various components of ability including physiological, biological, intellectual and cognitive skills, “Kp” factors represent existing knowledge of the learner, “M” factors represent affective factors including attitudes and motivation, and “O” factors represent opportunity for learning the language. Eshghinejad (2016) [
22] stated that attitude concept can be viewed from three dimensions regarding aspects of it, i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and emotional. Each one of these dimensions has different features to bring out language attitude results. The behavioral factors deal with the way one behaves and reacts in particular situations. Cognitive factors involve the beliefs of the learners about the knowledge that they receive and their understanding of the learning process. Emotional factors help teacher and students engage in various emotional activities.
Over the past years, statistical analysis on language attitude has been widely employed from different perspectives and with various dimensions. In terms of behavioral aspect of attitude, Kara (2009) [
23] processed the data obtained from 150 participants with SPSS, conducted samples t-tests, independents samples t-tests and correlation tests. The results suggested that positive attitude leads to the exhibition of positive behavior toward studying. Cognitive aspect of attitude responds to the learners’ beliefs in knowledge and understanding during language learning. Eshghinejad (2016) [
22] randomly selected 30 male and female freshman EFL students in the State University of Kashan and asked them to answer to the questionnaires. A t-test was applied to analyze the possible significance of the observed differences between male and female learners. Most of the respondents said that they enjoy learning English, not just for passing their exams. All respondents agreed that more knowledge and understanding are possible with learning English. With respect to the emotional aspect of attitude, Yasuhiro (2010) [
24] collected the data taken from the fifth meeting of one group consisting of three female students for case study. He stated that “emotions do not merely facilitate, filter, or hinder an individual’s inner cognitive functioning; rather, they can in any forms mediate development”.
With the rapid development of data mining, many people hope to acquire knowledge (besides statistical data) from mathematical models in terms of inference considerations, complexity considerations and visualization. These models can help extract information from data and transform the information into a comprehensible structure for further analysis. Regression analysis provides a statistical tool for evaluating the relationships among variables. Most commonly, regression analysis estimates the conditional expectation of the dependent variable given the independent variables, that is, the average value of the dependent variable when the independent variables are fixed. Yu (2014) [
25] proposed to build multiple linear regression model with the influencing factors of English reading ability based on the sample data. Katalin et al. (2016) [
26] used linear regression model to identify explanatory variables (educational funding rates and the number of students learning English language) which influence and mostly determine the quality of public education. However, regression analysis can deal with continuous variables rather than discrete variables. Bayesian Networks (BNs) are popular graphical model for encoding probabilistic relationships among a set of variables. They have been shown to be remarkably effective for data-modeling problems in different research domains, including medicine [
27,
28], business [
29,
30] and education [
31,
32], etc. This study contributes to an understanding of English learning and teaching and adds to the growing body of studies on the spread of English. The study is led by the following research questions:
The primary aim of the qualitative and quantitative study lies in its attempt to identify the interaction between different factors which might be associated with the English learning attitude of second language students. This study should be of interest to a number of researchers focusing on English as a foreign language for learners, English education policies and curriculum makers. By providing insights into attitudes of English learners and their purposes for learning English, this study can help teachers understand why their attitudes toward learning English vary so greatly and take a targeted pedagogical approach. In this paper, we collect some base data of deciding factors through questionnaires, calculate statistical data such as mean value and mutual information, and then apply one of the state-of-the-art BNs, which is the so-called tree augmented naive Bayes (TAN) [
33], to describe the interactions among these factors. After that, we report the main findings, which reveal the existing problems of EFL students in China, and we advocate for feasible pedagogical strategies to improve students’ attitudes and enhance their learning aspiration. Finally, we briefly discuss the value and significance of quantitative and qualitative analysis for English learning.