The Study On Chinese Language Learning Strategies Utilized By Serbian Students

With the improvement of China's international status and the rapid development of its economy,in recent years,the number of Chinese language learners all over the world is constantly increasing.Thus,it is becoming a challenge to figure out how in effective way to teach Chinese language.Due to the different languages,culture and learning circumstances students from different countries have different studying methods and needs.Therefore,it is necessarily to improve research on teaching Chinese language in non-targeted environment,and more specifically research on the characteristics and rules of acquisition of learners.Only in that way is possible to more explicitly develop teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Recently,researches mostly are paying attention on Chinese language learning strategies employed by foreign students who are studying in China,but researches inquiring which strategies students are using in non-target environment are not so often seen.Also,in the educational circles,there is not a lot of focus on how different learning environment is influencing the strategy choice,and comparison studies between students of different cultural background who are studying in non-target environment is rarely seen.This research taking these problems as a starting point,through quantitative and qualitative methods investigates which Chinese language learning strategies Serbian students are using in non-target language environment.In quantitative research we used questionnaire as a main research method.Questionnaire includes learning strategies for each language skill namely(listening,speaking,writing and reading).Overall 193 students coming from 4 different educational institutions in Serbia participated in the research.Author designed new learning strategy taxonomy by proposing new strategy type-intercultural communication strategies.This study using SPSS statistical analyzes,through descriptive analyzes,ANOVA analyzes,found characteristics and reasons of strategy usage of Chinese learning strategies employed by Serbian students in non-target environment,and got the following results:for listening strategies,there are 5 factors,the usage frequency of this 5 factors is:social strategies>affective strategies>cognitive strategies>intercultural communication strategies>metacognitive strategies.For "speaking" the frequency usage is:social strategies>affective strategies>metacognitive strategies>cognitive strategies>intercultural communication strategies;for "writing" the strategy usage is the following:affective strategies,cognitive strategies,metacognitive,social strategies,and "reading" is consisted of two factors cognitive strategy with much higher mean of 4.04 than intercultural communication strategies with mean of 3.59.We also did statistical analyzes to see how age factor of students and different studying period of Chinese language can influence the strategic choice and preferences.Through LOGIT we analyzed how choices of strategies influence the studying marks and achieved the following results:for"listening",social strategies can influence the marks,if students are using more often social strategies their marks can be higher,for "speaking",intercultural communication has positive influence on marks,for"writing"cognitive strategies are positively influencing marks;when it comes to"reading",we did not find statistical results which will show which of two factors is influencing the marks.In order to understand how students with high marks are studying Chinese,we did qualitative research in which we compared the answers of those students with students with lower marks and analyzed the differences between these two groups.This study did analyze how learning environment is influencing the usage and choice of learning strategies.We did it from micro and macro perspective.From micro perspective we researched how different learning circumstances and teaching goals are influencing strategy choice.Therefore,we compared students of different schools:Philology Faculty of Belgrade University,Megatrend University,Belgrade Foreign Language High School and Belgrade Confucius institute,and concluded that students of different school,due to the different learning environment,teaching goals,studying goals,different majors and occupations,are having different strategy preferences.On macro perspective we did two different comparisons.The first is comparison of strategy use and choice employed by Serbian,Russians and American students who are studying Chinese language in their home countries.We could clearly see the similar and different strategy usage of these three groups and what precisely are characteristic of learning behavior of Serbian students.Most importantly our conclusion is that the reasons for strategy choice of Serbian students lies in national characteristics of Serbian people,foreign language teaching policy and teaching methods in Serbia.The second comparison is between strategy usage and choice of Serbian students in target and non-target environment.Author did qualitative research of how strategy choice and usage is changing if students from non-target environment are coming to learn in target environment.We found that Serbian students who are studying in China have some common strategic behavior but the differences in their strategic choice is influenced by their prior Chinese language learning experience before coming to China.Finally,this study pointed out the importance of strategy instruction.We also gave teaching proposals,hoping that teachers can help students to establish solid strategy awareness and more affectively to use learning strategies.It is our hope that this study can contribute in developing teaching Chinese as a second language discipline.