A Survey Study On Senior High School Students’ Use Of English Speaking Strategies

English speaking is one of the main accesses to language output for learners,and it is also one of the important lingual skills that students have to master.Therefore,the study of the use of English speaking strategies play a vital and practical significance for English learning and teaching.To learn and use English speaking strategies is beneficial for students to improve their oral English test scores.Though the research of language learning strategies in general has been a hot topic for forty years,English speaking strategies have not been paid enough attention to,therefore,author selects English speaking strategies as the cut-over point for research.The present study selects 200 senior students from 12 parallel classes at K City No.2 Middle School as research subjects.In order to understand the overall situation of English speaking strategies use and put forward some pedagogical implications to improve students’ oral English,this research applies questionnaire and interview to answer the following three questions:1.What is the overall situation of English speaking strategies use? 2.Is there any significant correlation between English speaking strategies use and oral English test scores? 3.Is there any significant differences of speaking strategies use between higher achievers and lower achievers?The research procedures are as the following.1.Self-designed questionnaire is used,which is adapted from Oxford’s(1990)SILL according to the overall situations of K City No.2 Middle School senior three students.2.The oral English test paper is adapted by the 2018 Fujian province’s college entrance examination oral English test.3.SPSS 22.0 is applied to analyze the data from the questionnaire and oral English test.The major findings are as follows: 1.K City No.2 Middle School senior three students use English speaking strategies,at a medium level.Besides,of the six sub-categories,the rank is as follows: social speaking strategies > memory speaking strategies > compensation speaking strategies > meta-cognitive speaking strategies > cognitive speaking strategies > cognitive speaking strategies > affective strategies.2.Speaking strategies use and oral English test scores are correlated.As Spearman correlation shows,memory speaking strategies are highly correlated with oral English test scores.Affective speaking strategies and meta-cognitive speaking strategies are closely related with English scores.Cognitive speaking Strategies,social speaking strategies,compensation speaking strategies are practically correlated with student’s oral English test scores.3.There are differences between higher achievers and lower achievers’ use of speaking strategies.Generally speaking,higher achievers adopt all the six sub-categories more frequently than the lower achievers.Some pedagogical implications are explored from this research.The pedagogical implications for schools,teachers and students are as the follows.1.For schools:(1)Offer English speaking strategies training curriculum.(2)Train teachers with English speaking strategies.2.For teachers:(1)Cultivate students’ speaking strategies awareness.(2)To supervise and manage oral English learning.(3)Combine classroom activities with extra-curriculum activities.(4)Pay attention to cultivate all kinds of language skills.3.For students:(1)Foster the English speaking strategies awareness.(2)Stimulate the learning motivation and interest.Then,tentative discussions about the results,innovation and limitations are presented.Suggestions about the future researches are offered at the end of the thesis.