Study On Beliefs, Learning Strategies And Motivation Of Non-English Major Students

Since the early 1970s, research in the field of second language acquisition has shifted from teaching methods to individual learner differences. Individual learner differences involve many factors such as age, language aptitude, motivation, cognitive style and learning strategies, among which learning strategies become one of the major concerns in language learning. Research on learning strategies and the factors that affect the choice and use of learning strategy shows great potential because understanding how the students learn a foreign language is the critical precondition of determining how the language teachers teach. Moreover, understanding students'learning process is helpful to language teachers in the design and implementation of effective language instruction. Up to now, a great deal of research has been done on learning strategies at home and abroad. Research on learning strategies has experienced three stages since 1970s: the first stage concerns with identifying and listing all the strategies that second language learners used in their learning; the second stage focuses on classifying and giving definitions to learning strategies and the third stage deals with the effectiveness of learning strategies with their results reported and compared. Research results have proved that learning strategies are beneficial to improving the learning efficiency. In China, research on learning strategies has been increasing since 1980s. Most of these research focuses on one aspect of language learning skills from micro point of view and some convincing results have been acquired. However, due to different educational settings, learning goals, teaching methods, task requirements and subjects, the findings are not completely consistent and further investigations need to be conducted. Moreover, the relationship between learning strategies and other factors affecting learning strategy choice and use is seldom studied. This study is undertaken to find out the students'learning strategies at general higher institutes and how their learning strategies are affected by beliefs and motivations. The subjects involved are 129 non-English major students from freshmen, sophomore and junior of the same major. The instruments used to collect the data are questionnaire, interview and observation. The SPSS is used to analyze the data. The research results indicate that students have clear beliefs about English learning, but they cannot put what they believe in into practice completely and adopt all kinds learning strategies in their English learning. Their motivation of learning English is not strong. With the improvement of their English, students'beliefs, motivation and learning strategies change gradually during the three years'college English learning: their management beliefs, meaning-focused beliefs, accuracy-focused beliefs and fluency-focused beliefs are becoming stronger and stronger whereas their form-focused beliefs and mother-tongue-reliance beliefs are getting weaker and weaker; they gradually more adopt management strategies, meaning-focused strategies and fluency-focused strategies and less adopt form-focused strategies, accuracy-focused strategies and mother-tongue-reliance strategies; their surface motivation almost has no changes, while their deep motivation is getting stronger and stronger. Statistical results also show that there is a close relationship between the beliefs, motivation and learning strategies, but the relationships between beliefs and motivation are weaker. It is also found that beliefs and motivation affect the choice and use of learning strategies to some degree. Finally, the necessity of cultivating students'beliefs, learning strategies and motivation is put forward and conduction of the learning strategy teaching and training is recommended.