An Investigative Study On English Learning Strategy Used By Rural Junior Middle School Students Under The Background Of The New Curriculum Standard

The New English Curriculum Standard(NECS)began to be implemented in middle schools in 2011.It requires that teachers should pay attention to the cultivation of students' English learning strategies in order to form their own proper learning strategies and improve their learning abilities.However,in rural middle schools,due to the backward infrastructure,poor teaching resources and limited teacher quantity,as well as teachers' insufficient focus on the cultivation of students' learning strategies,the quality of rural English teaching is badly affected.Therefore,it is necessary to strengthen the research on rural middle school students' English learning strategies.Based on the theories of constructivism and cognitive learning,this thesis aims to understand the use of English learning strategies of rural middle school students from the perspective of the requirement by NECS in terms of learning strategies.It studies from the following three aspects:Question 1.What is the situation of English learning strategy used by rural junior middle school students under the background of the NECS?Question 2.Is there any correlation between the application of students' English learning strategies and their English proficiency ?Question 3.If so,what are the differences between high-score students and low-score students in the use of English learning strategies?The author selected 242 students from five classes in Grade Seven of Zhaodong Middle School,Heilongjiang Province as the research subjects,and adopted the research instruments such as questionnaire,test and interview to collect the data.The results were analyzed by the use of SPSS software.The results show that firstly,under the background of the NECS,the overall use of learning strategy in rural middle school students is in the medium level.However,there are differences in the frequency of different dimensions of learning strategies,among which the frequency of cognitive strategies is the highest and resource strategies is the lowest,the fact is related to the poor teaching resources in rural areas;secondly,there is a significant positive correlation between English learning strategies and learning achievement.Among them communication strategies have the highest correlation with academic performance,whereas cognitive strategieshave the lowest correlation with academic performance,this indicates that lack of good English communicative environment leads to unsatisfactory learning result for rural middle school students;thirdly,there are significant differences in the use of English learning strategies between the high-score group and the low-score group.In detail,the difference in the use of cognitive strategies between the high-score group and the low-score group is the smallest,and the difference in the use of resource strategies is the biggest,which shows that high-score students can effectively take advantage of existing teaching resources to improve their English proficiency.It is hoped that the study findings and pedagogical suggestions will be helpful to junior middle school English teachers and teaching in rural areas.