Research On Oral English Learning Strategies Employed By Non-English Majors With Introversion And Extroversion

Studies on language learning strategies began in 1960s, which is the overlapping result of foreign language teaching and psychology. In the last few decades, a number of researches have been done on learning strategies. Personality, one of the important factors in the employment of language learning strategies, has also received the scholars'attention. The study of language learning strategies in China has begun since 1984, but there are few focusing on the relationship between personality types and language learning strategies, and in most of those few studies, language learning is studied as a whole, regardless of the different aspects of language learning. Therefore, the present study focuses on the study of the relationship between personality types and language learning strategies in oral English.This study chose 138 first-year non-English majors from Dalian University of Technology as the subjects. At first, the subjects'personality was identified based on a personality questionnaire, their teacher's and peer's evaluation and the researcher's observation, and the final result is that 13 are introverts and 12 are extroverts. Then, language learning strategies in oral English used by those subjects with the strong tendency of introversion and extroversion were investigated by a strategy questionnaire, interviews and classroom observations. The strategy questionnaire was designed according to Oxford's (1990) classification scheme, and the difference was that the researcher separated formal practice strategies and functional strategies from cognitive strategies as two independent strategy categories. Finally, SPSS 16.0 was used to analyze the data obtained. The result of the analysis was that there was no significant difference in the use of overall strategies between introverts and extroverts, but in the strategy categories, the usage of compensation strategy was found to be significant different between introverts and extroverts, and extroverts use it more frequently than the introverts. In the individual strategies, compensation strategy 2 was used significantly different between introverts and extroverts.Based on the research result, the paper discusses some suggestions for oral English learning and teaching. The present study is instructive for oral English teaching and learning.