An Investigation Into Grammar Learning Strategies Employed By English Majors In Inner Mongolia Normal University

As is well known, any teaching activity consists of two parts:teaching and learning. The current education world fully realizes the importance of learning and put forward the education concept of students as main body and teacher as a guide. As for learning, learning strategies play a very important role in it, even determining the concrete effect or its final outcomes. As a Chinese saying goes, "It is better to teach a man how to fish than to give him fish". So, English teachers should attach great importance to the study and training of students'learning strategies in teaching, including English grammar teaching.In recent years, there have been an increasing number of studies in language learning strategies; however, there have been still few studies on grammar learning strategies. In addition, due to the widespread application of communicative language teaching approach, the position of grammar has been severely weakened. Many people, including English teachers, think that learning English means learning oral English well and grammar is boring and useless, which is only learned to pass English examinations. But the author holds that grammar teaching and the study and training in grammar learning strategies are not inconsistent with communicative language teaching approach, because English sentences are an indispensible part of any communication activity in English and grammar is also indispensible for making sentences with words, especially in writing which emphasizes accuracy. Besides, the investigation is carried out among the Mongolian-nationality-class and Han-nationality-class English majors in Inner Mongolia Normal University, who are being trained to be future teachers of English and whose major is called English education, so this study assumes even greater importance. Based on the above, this study attempts to address the following questions:1) What types of grammar learning strategies do the English majors in IMNU tend to employ in learning English grammar on the whole? 2) Is there any difference or similarity in the employment of English grammar learning strategies (EGLS) between English majors in Mongolian-nationality classes and those in Han-nationality classes? 3) How different or similar is it in terms of the use of EGLS between high-achievers (HA) and low-achievers (LA) in IMNU within the two different groups of classes?The present study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate grammar learning strategies of English majors. The data are collected through the Likert-scale questionnaire of English grammar learning strategies, the English grammar exam, and the interview. Eighty-six second-year English majors from the English Department in IMNU participate in this investigation. The questionnaire is administered to them so as to elicit data regarding students' strategy use. Students' achievements in the English grammar exam carried out at the end of the last semester are used to assess students' grammar learning outcomes. The interview is used to elicit qualitative data with regard to students' facts or statements about learning English grammar. SPSS 13.0 is used to analyze the quantitative data from the questionnaire and the grammar exam:1) descriptive statistics are computed to summarize the students'frequency of overall strategy use; 2) independent samples t-tests are conducted to check the differences and similarities in the use of individual EGLS between Mongolian-nationality-class and Han-nationality-class English majors; 3) Independent samples t-tests are conducted to check the differences and similarities in the use of individual EGLS between Mongolian-nationality-class HA and LA and between Han-nationality-class HA and LA.The final findings indicate:1) the frequency of overall strategy use of English majors is at a medium level; 2) most of the English majors regard grammar learning as very important to English learning and should study it hard, but most of them also consider it as very boring and one of their main grammar learning purposes is to get good results in English examinations; 3) there are differences or similarities between Han-nationality-class and Mongolian-nationality-class English majors and also between their respective HA and LA in the use of many EGLS; in addition, all the English majors generally use affective strategies most frequently.4) In addition, some deficiencies are also uncovered by the summarization of infrequently used strategies. For example, Han-nationality-class English majors use metacognitive strategy at a relatively low level and Mongolian-nationality-class English majors use social strategy and cognitive strategy at a relatively low level. The use of some specific strategies, for example, advance preparation strategy, preparation strategy and self-evaluation strategy, is at a low level too.In summary, these findings show that effective English grammar learning strategies will facilitate English grammar learning and teachers should provide strategy-based grammar teaching and help students to use English grammar learning strategies effectively. At the same time, English teachers are advised to improve the ways of grammar teaching and to assist students in becoming autonomous learners. Meanwhile, students are suggested establishing an objective view about grammar, strengthening the learning and using of grammar learning strategies, and improving their grammar learning by enhancing cooperative learning.It should be noted at the same time that the study itself has some limitations. For instance, the scale of the questionnaire is rather limited and there may be some deficiencies in the questionnaire itself because its compilation is restricted by many factors. Therefore, further studies on EGLS should be conducted in the future.