The Relationship Between Extroversion/Introversion And Metacognitive Strategies Uses Of College Non-English Majors

With the continuous development of globalization, English is widely popularized as one of the lingua francs in cross-cultural communications and various worldwide trades. Under this circumstance, English are universally learnt as the most popular foreign or second language worldwide, especially in China. English, as a compulsory subject, is required to be learnt by kindergarten students as well as by college students. Additionally, recruiters of many joint-venture companies prefer to employ graduates with a high proficiency in English. All of these requirements force students to strive as much as possible to learn English well. For most students, learning English is both time-consuming and painstaking. What is worse is that their hard-working is fruitless. No matter how much effort made, they still encounter various problems and feel defeated in learning it. It seems that they are doomed to be incompetence. With regard to this phenomenon, many Chinese scholars have contributed to studying factors affecting English achievements such as attitudes, motivations, learning strategies, and personality types. In this thesis, extroversion and introversion are studied as the two variables, which are supposed to have different impacts on metacognitive strategies uses.This thesis aims to explore relationships between extroversion/introversion and metacognitive strategies uses, basing on a survey of124first-year non-English major college students in Xi'an International Studies University and Xi'an Peihua University. Questionnaires adopted are designed in three parts:1) personality questionnaire based on EPQ-R;2) participants'preferences in using metacognitive strategies based on SILL;3) classroom interviews. Each part of this questionnaire accords to the statistical requirement, thus having a high reliability.Based on analysis of results collected in this survey, the following conclusions are made:1) each applicative rate of three sub-categorized metacognitive strategies shows an overall decreasing tendency from extroverts to introverts;2) extroverted students show a dominant advantage on using self-evaluating strategy;3) introverted students prefer to make plans and their ability of self-regulation are much more powerful. According to these conclusions, it is suggested that introverted students should diversify their assessment approaches to make an appropriate self-evaluation, which can avoid underestimations and cultivate their confidence to learn English in daily communications. In contrast, extroverted students should pay more attention to practice their self-constraining ability and are encouraged to make learning plans with the hope of improving learning efficiency. It is hoped that suggestions and recommendations proposed in this thesis can promote further development of studies in this field as well as make contributions to non-English major college English learning and teaching.