Minority Students' English Learning Strategy Research

There are 55 minorities in our country. Every ethnic group has its unique cultural and educational background and 53 minorities have their own languages. Guizhou province is a multinational western province but its economical development and education level are relatively lagging. Raising high-quality talents for these minorities are foundation and inevitable choice for the west development. Therefore, taking Guizhou as the example, making a thorough research on the particularity of English education in minority areas, constructing certain English education patterns, solving a series of English education questions in these areas, has become an urgent and important matter for minority areas on its education development.The research on study strategies has become a hot spot in education and psychological scientific research domain since the 1970s. Some western linguists and the psychologists pointed out that suitable use of the learning strategies can effectively help foreign language learners. Some Chinese scholars also drawn similar conclusion after conducting strategy research on Chinese foreign language learners. But, there were few strategies research based on experiments about the minority students which is a specific group but people generally treated them as common undergraduates without realizing its particularity. Many researchers thought the minority students' low English level was due to the cross-language, cross-cultural teaching. In the teaching process, Chinese was used as the intermediary language, in which situation the dual language and culture transforming made the minority students study English be more difficult. This thesis will investigate minority student English learning from the learning strategy's point of view. A questionnaire answered by minority students in Guizhou University will be used to explore how the minority students used learning strategies in their English study. Therefore, try to discover some rules and questions, then analyze its reasons. Meanwhile, this thesis proposes some suggestion on how to raise the minority student English learning strategies, such as transforming teacher's teaching idea; increasing teacher's consciousness on strategy training; arousing the minority students' interest and confidence in English study; strengthening the training and supervision, fostering students' strategy-using custom.Finally, the minority students' English educational reform is one part of university English educational reform. The thesis puts forward some proposals to the universities in multi-national area from the teaching idea, the curriculum, the teaching material, the classroom instruction pattern as well as teaching environment. Doing a research on the particularity of minority undergraduates' English learning is for the purpose of seeking an effective way to enhance their English proficiency and bring up inter-disciplinary minority talents who have high English level of aggregation, rich cultural knowledge and strong practice ability.