English Language Learning Strategies In China

China claims the largest population of English language learners in the world but fewof the Chinese English learners can be said to be successful, not even those in universities,in the sense that after several years' learning, most of them are still unable tocommunicate properly in English, neither orally nor in written form. The failure isbelieved to result mainly from two factors, teaching methodologies and learning strategies.As for teaching methodologies, much attention has been' paid, and measures havebeen taken to cope with the issue in the past few decades, most notably in the 19.80s, whenit was generally believed that teaching methods generally practiced in Chinese ELTclassrooms, such as translation-grammar method, were notgood enough for effective ELT,and when a need for the introduction, investigation and application of other teachingmethodologies was strongly felt. Then the 1990s saw a boom in the introduction, studyand practice of new teaching methodologies. And researches and experiments abounded inthis area. To a certain degree these measures are successful, although they could have beenmore successful.Research on learning strategies is becoming more and more important in the fields ofapplied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and especially in English language teaching, mQst ofthe studies were done in the western countries. Little has been done in the Chinese contextof learning strategies. So far as we know, the only systematic study in China on learningstrategies is conducted by Wen Qiufang, who investigates the learning strategies used byChinese EFL learners, presents a theoretical framework and suggests the application oflearning strategies in Chinese context.The importance of the study and application of learning strategies is seen and64English Lan~'uage Learning Strategies in Chinaunderstood by more and more people in the field of ELT in China. We believe theimportance should be studied out of the consideration of the following aspects. Firstly, ifwe take a humanistic view of education in general and language learning in particular, weshould take the learner into full consideration. It is generally accepted that language classshould be learner-centred, and many ELT researchers and teachers abroad have conductedstudies in this area, Although in China the concept of learner-centeredness is establishedand many teachers and researchers perceive it as a very important factor in ELT, littlestudy has been done to investigate what learner-centeredness entails. The preliminaryphilosophy behind learner-centredness is that learners are regarded as human beings in thefirst place. Their personalities, cognitive styles, interests~ attitudes toward EFL and somany others are determinants of their learning effectiveness. If the assumption thatlearners should be regarded as human beings is accepted, then it is inevitable that learnerfactors be carefully studied, and learning strategies be investigated and developed so as tocultivate appropriate learning strategies in individual learners.Secondly, the understanding of learning process facilitates the research, and theapplication of effective teaching methods. Although many teaching methods emerged inthe last century, yet many of them fail to last long enough before researchers and teachersdismiss them as not so effective, or as inappropriate or, impotent. The reason is thatteaching method is only one of the three broad aspects that affect the product of languagelearning, the other two aspects being the learner characteristics and the environment.Naturally, research focusing on only one of the three interrelated aspects and neglectingthe other two cannot be fruitful enough. Actually more attention should have been paid tothe characteristics of the learners which we think are the most import...