An Action Research On Improving Junior High School Students’ Learning Strategies By Guided Learning Plan

According to the requirements of the new round of basic education reform,teaching has to shift from teaching students knowledge to teaching students learning,therefore,how to improve students’ learning strategies and thus teach them to learn is a concern for teachers.During the internship,the researcher observed that students lacked awareness of the use of learning strategies and rarely applied them to their English learning,being a chal enge for them to take ownership of their learning.Based on previous research,the researcher conducted an action research to explore these research questions.(1)What is the current situation of junior high school students’ learning strategies?(2)What aspects of students’ cognitive strategies have been changed by the GLP?(3)What aspects of students’ metacognitive strategies have been changed by the GLP?This study was conducted with 53 students from a junior high school in Shenyang.The whole study consisted of two rounds of action research,lasting 12 weeks,with each round consisting of establishing the problem,developing the research plan,implementing the research plan,reflecting and evaluating,using questionnaire and interview as research tools54.The questionnaire was based on the Oxford Learning Strategies Inventory,Pan Lei and Xu Chunxia’s English Learning Strategies Questionnaire for Junior High School Students and Xiao Wu Yun’s Learning Strategies Questionnaire for Secondary School Students,and was designed with the research questions of this study in mind.Interviews were used as supplementary tools to better document the changes in students’ learning strategies.Before implementing the first round of action research,the researcher administered questionnaires to students in order to better understand the current status of their use of learning strategies.In the first round of action research,the researcher summarized and reflected on the results of the questionnaires and interviews in order to develop a new action plan and implement the adjusted action plan.Finally,the results following two rounds of action research were summarized.The results show that the guided learning plan has a positive impact on students’ learning strategies.The guided learning plan helps students to pre-learn before class,enabling them to use the organizational strategies in the cognitive strategies to grasp the main points in class;to guide them to conduct class discussions in an orderly manner,to use the retel ing strategies in the cognitive strategies to facilitate their improvement of in oral expression;to use the refinement strategies to complete the exercises in the guided learning plan;to enhance the self-evaluation strategies in the metacognitive strategies according to the self-evaluation scales after class,and to provide The learning guide provides a basis for students to use the monitoring strategies in the metacognitive strategies in the learning process.