A Comparative Study Of Learning Strategies Employed By Chinese High School Students And University Students

This paper reports on a comparative study of learning strategies employed by Chinese high school students and university students in an attempt to reveal the differences and similarities in learning strategy use between the two levels of students. The subjects involved in this study were 45 high school students from Zhenjiang Number 3 Middle School and 45 university students from Jiangsu University. They were asked to reply to the Oxford (1990) SILL questionnaire and a quantitative research was conducted on the basis of Oxford (1990) five-point frequency scale. Then four students from each level were interviewed individually and some case studies were carried out. The data-analysis included two tasks: (1) Detecting the tendencies of learning strategies used by the high school students and the university students. (2) Anatyzing the differences and/or similarities in learning strategy use between the high school students and the university students. The case studies aimed at providing in-depth and detailed explanations.The major findings of this study are:First, on the average, Chinese university students employed learning strategies more frequently than high school students did.Second, Chinese university students used metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and compensation strategies much more frequently than high school students did.Third, both levels of students tended to be unwilling to use many social strategies or affective strategies.Fourth, both levels of students were inclined to memorize English mechanically, without being aware of some useful memory strategies.The major implications of this study are:First, Chinese EFL teachers in high schools should lay emphasis on the training of learning strategies, especially those of the metacognitive strategies, which can help high school students to learner autonomy.Second, EFL teachers in both high schools and universities should sensitize their students to the importance of cooperative learning through the training of social strategies.Third, EFL teachers in both high schools and universities should train their students to makeuse of other effective memory strategies in addition to their usual practice of mechanical memorizing.