Relationship Between Goal Orientations And Use Of Learning Strategies: A Study Of Chinese College Students' English Learning

In educational psychology, the study of the relationship between learners' goal orientations and learning strategies is recently a very active area of research. In second language acquisition, the study of goals should also be an important component of motivation research because "Motivation is usually defined as a psychological trait which leads people to achieve some goal. In language learning, that goal may be mastery of the language or achievement of some lesser aim."(Johnson & Johnson, 1998:219-220) The study of learners' goals not only helps us understand learners' motivation, but also contributes a lot to learning strategy training. However, "it needs to be noted that there have hardly been any attempts in second language studies to adopt the other well-known goal theory in educational psychology, goal orientation theory" (original italics) (Dornyei, 2003:9). In that context, the present study adopted the theory from educational psychology and applied it to Chinese college students' English learning in the hope of making up this deficiency.Through interviews and questionnaires, the present study collected data of goal orientations and strategy use of 185 English majors and 176 non-English majors who were in their second year of college study. The data were then analyzed with SPSS (10.0). The main findings are as follows:1. The two types of goal orientations, performance goal orientation (PGO) and mastery goal orientation (MGO), which have been proposed and discussed by educational psychologists in the last twenty years, do exist in Chinese college students' English learning. The first type is peer-referenced, which emphasizes achieving high grades and outperforming others to gain social approval and enhance one's ego. Learners with this orientation are typically concerned with the outcomerather than with the actual process of learning and are more likely to compare their performance to others and focus on demonstrating competence. In the second type, the goal is represented as mastery and understanding with an emphasis on self-development, and the criterion of achievement being the improvement of knowledge and skills. So these learners are self-referenced and task-referenced and display "mastery-oriented" behavior. The former goal orientation is also labeled "ego-social goal orientation," and the latter one is also referred to as "task-mastery goal orientation" or "learning goal orientation."2. Besides the above-mentioned two goal orientations, Chinese college students displayed a third one ?test goal orientation (TGO), which meant that these students only intended to pass the required tests to get the certificates, without the goal of outperforming others or acquiring new knowledge or skills. As for the English majors, the group with a mixture of MGO and PGO was the largest (35.14%) and the proportions of the students who could be regarded as having a clear MGO, PGO and TGO were 20.54%, 21.08% and 12.43% respectively. As for the non-English majors, the proportion of the students with a mixture of MGO and PGO was 19.32 % and the proportions of the students who could be regarded as having a clear MGO, PGO and TGO were 10.23%, 9.66% and 28.98% respectively.3. The following results from the correlational and multiple regression analyses were common to both English majors and non-English majors: (1) Mastery goal orientation was significantly and positively correlated with memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and social strategies, and could predict significantly the students' use of these strategies. (2) Performance goal orientation was significantly and positively correlated with surface (I found some strategies reported by the learners, such as rote learning of words and grammar rules with vocabulary handbooks and grammar books, test rehearsal, etc., could not be classified into Oxford' SILL, so I named them "surface strategies"), affective and social strategies, and could predict significantly the student's use of these strategies. (3) Test goal orientation was significantly and negativ...