A Study Of The Correlations Between The English Majors' Learning Beliefs, Their Learning Strategies And English Proficiency

A learner should use proper language learning strategies and develop his beliefs about language learning to be more autonomous. Both"learning strategies"and"learning beliefs"as well as their relationships have been previously studied by many researchers (Wenden, 1987; Horwitz, 1988; Oxford, 1990; Yang, 1993; Wen Qiufang, 1995), but few directly looked into whether and how learning strategies, learning beliefs and language proficiency are related to one another.The author attempts to indentify English majors'learning beliefs and their strategy uses and investigate into the relationships among beliefs about language learning, learning strategies and their English proficiency. To find the answer, the author conducted an empirical study, by using questionnaires and test scores to survey a total of 108 junior English majors from Foreign Language Department of Changchun Normal University (CCNU). Data were collected and analyzed via the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS12.0). Several conclusions are drawn from this study:According to the sequence of the strategy use frequency, English majors adopted more compensation, metacognitive, social strategies than cognitive, affective and memory strategies.Among the five categories of beliefs about language learning, learner motivation and expectation is the strongest belief, followed by beliefs about learning and communication strategies, the nature of language learning, foreign language aptitude, and the difficulty of language learning.The results indicate that English majors'beliefs about language learning are generally related to their use of language learning strategies. However, some beliefs about language learning are more related to the use of strategies than other beliefs. The study also finds that the correlations are only found to be significant between proficiency and cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, and social strategies. The results show that the correlation is significant between proficiency and the difficulty of language learning and it further indicates that it is also significant in distinguishing high proficiency students from low proficiency students.The study provides empirical support for the relationships among the use of language learning strategies, beliefs about language learning and English proficiency. It helps to make it clear for the English majors to combine their efforts in belief and strategy training to achieve autonomous learning. It can't be denied that there are still some limitations in this study, leaving some space for further improvement.