A Study On The Relationship Between Language Learning Beliefs And Learning Strategies Of Non-English Majors

Exploring and investigating learners'language learning beliefs and learning strategies will help them build up positive beliefs and employ appropriate approaches in English learning.The present study takes 120 non-English majors of the first year students from Yantai Vocational College as subjects.Two questionnaires which are Horwitz's(1987) Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI) and Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) are applied to collect data about students' learning beliefs and learning strategies.The data collected were fed into the computer and analyzed by SPSS.This study employs such statistical analyses as descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation analysis to analyze the general distribution of language learning beliefs and language learning strategies, the comparison of learning beliefs and learning strategies between the Liberal Arts students (LA) and Academic Science students (AS) and the relationship between learning beliefs and learning strategies.The results of the study show:LA hold some more optimistic beliefs in language learning than their counterparts AS.And LA employed some more strategies than LA.Another major result is that some belief and strategy differences do exist between LA and AS.Means about the assessment of language learning difficulty of English by LA is much higher than their counterparts AS.About the strategy category differences, LA employ cognitive and social strategies more frequently than AS do.About the correlations with belief categories and strategy categories, language learning difficulty correlates with cognitive strategy, motivation correlates with affective strategy and overall learning strategy weakly. The others show no correlations with each other.Based on the findings, the author attempts to find out the existed problems and put forward some reasonable suggestions in language learning and for future college English teaching. I wish it would be of certain usefulness to the belief and strategy study of vocational students.