A Study Of Students' Ability Of Applying The Learning Strategies In The Learning Bilingual Courses At Wzu;a Study Of Students' Ability Of Applying The Learning Strategies In The Learning Bilingual Courses At Wzu

Since China's Ministry of Education has issued a document"Some Requirements on Strengthening Undergraduate Teaching and Improving Teaching Quality in Colleges and Universities"in 2001, bilingual teaching has flourished in various universities and become one of the focuses of reform. Researches about bilingual teaching come out rapidly. However, very few people have paid attention to students'learning strategies applied in the learning of bilingual courses. In fact, the learning strategy research into bilingual teaching can enhance students'learning efficiency and bilingual teaching outcomes. The studies of learning strategies are more valuable and practical for bilingual teaching.The present study investigates the learning strategies that students have employed in bilingual courses at Wenzhou University (WZU). It focuses on examining the relationship between strategy use and such factors as achievements in learning of the bilingual courses, gender, disciplines, year of enrollment. The subjects of the present study include those one hundred and thirteen students from three bilingual courses including Organic Chemistry, American Economics Issues, and International Marketing. The questionnaire they are invited to answer is developed according to preliminary interviews with six students selected randomly, Mckeachie's taxonomy, O'Malley and Chamot's classification, and Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). It consists of thirty-five items and three categories including cognitive, metacognitve and resource strategies. Two stages are involved in this study. The first stage is preliminary interviews and design of the questionnaire, the second one is questionnaire survey. The data collected through the survey is analyzed by use of the software statistic tool of SPSS which consists of descriptive statistics analysis, Crosstabs, One Way ANOVA, Independent-Samples T Test.The results of the data analysis reveal the following findings:1. The students use the learning strategies at medium level both as a whole and at the category level in learning of the bilingual courses. The matecognitive strategies are used most frequently followed by cognitive strategies as the second, then resource strategies as the last. The most frequently used individual strategies involve finishing homework on time and note-taking which is used frequently in traditional classes. The least used item is using English for thinking, questioning and answering in class, the mean for the least used item is 2.54. Accordingly, all individual strategies are used at medium level.2. Learning strategy use is positively significantly correlated to bilingual courses achievement.3. The high level students use entire learning strategies as well as three subcategories(cognitive strategies, matecognitive strategies, resource strategies) more frequently than middle and low level students. And the middle level students use learning strategies more often than low level students. All the high, middle and low level students use the entire strategies in the medium frequency. For all three proficiency groups, the most popular used strategy type is the metacognitive strategy category. There are significant differences existing in the entire strategy use and resource strategy use among three groups.4. There are statistically significant differences in the use of strategies among students of different disciplines and years of enrollment. However, there is no difference between male and female students in the use of learning strategies as a whole or subscale.In the end, pedagogical suggestions yielded from the above findings are presented , also the limitations of the present study.