Gender And Language Learning Strategy Use

This paper reports on a survey of language learning strategies used by a group of Chinese EFL learners. The aims of the study are to investigate levels of strategy use among the group, and to examine levels of correlation between strategy use and gender. The SILL (Strategies Inventory of Language Learning) by Oxford (1990) was used in this large scale (N=269) quantitative study. The results showed that compensation and metacognitive strategies were the most used, while social and memory strategies were the least used. This result seemed to have no relationship with specialty or university the learners are in. Previous research on the nature of learning strategies and its relationships with some learner individual factors, esp. gender are reviewed. In this study, it was found that there was significant variation in gender on overall strategy use, on the use of the six categories listed in SILL and on some individual strategies on the SILL. Females were reported using strategies significantly more often than males. Learners in different specialty or university were reported to have different variation by gender on the six strategy categories. Finally the paper discusses the implication for teachers and learners.