The Language Learning Strategies Of Normal University English Majors And The Pedagogical Implications

In second/foreign language teaching, nothing has changed so much as teaching methods. Research on language teaching in recent years has moved away from the quest for the perfect teaching method, focusing instead on how successful teachers and learners actually achieve their goals. In the case of learners, it has led to the study of (1) how learners approach learning, both in and out of classrooms, and (2) the kinds of strategies and cognitive processing they use in second language acquisition.Learners vary in their language learning. The individual variation includes many learner variables such as age, gender, personality, language aptitude, motivation, cognitive style, learning strategies, etc., of which some are unchangeable or very difficult to get changed such as age, gender and personality, and some are alterable. Training in learning strategies, for example, could enable the learner to choose consciously a set of learning strategies, to abandon the ineffective or unfavorable ones, and to revise constantly the strategy selection according to his concrete conditions, thereby obtaining optimal results of language learning.Language learning strategies are special ways taken by the learner to enhance comprehension, learning, and acquisition of the target language, involving both specific behaviors and nonobservable mental processes. Systematic studies on language learning strategies began about thirty years ago. Preliminary results have shown that every learner more or less uses some learning strategies either consciously or unconsciously. A growing body of studies has demonstrated that strategy use is associated with language outcomes; successful learners generally use a greater variety of strategies and use them in appropriate ways. Some researchers reported still more promising results that unsuccessful learners,after being trained in learning strategies, could make considerable improvement in their language learning.In this thesis, by means of questionnaires, we made an investigation into the language learning strategies used by English majors in normal university for the purpose of drawing English teachers' attention to this matter and providing the information for learners and teachers in Chinese context as a theoretical basis for incorporating learning strategy training into the English teaching program.Seventy-eight English majors from two grades of our university were asked to complete a Language Learning Strategies Questionnaire and a Learning Style Questionnaire. Results showed that the frequency of overall strategy use in these students was not high. More than half of the students sometimes used learning strategies. Only about one-third usually used strategies. About five percent usually did not use strategies. No significant difference was found in the frequency of overall strategy use between the second-year students and the fourth-year students. When the strategies were broken down into six parts, however, the second-year students reported using much more affective strategies than the fourth-year students. Our explanation is that such difference may be related to the current curriculum in which aural-oral practice dominates in the first two years of the four-year English program, and students unconsciously use affective strategies to reduce anxiety in listening and speaking. In contrast, the main courses in the last two years are about reading and writing in which less aural-oral practice is performed, whereby the fourth-year students use affective strategies less often.Based on the achievements of the Graded Test for English Majors Band 8 (GEM8) -a nation-wide standardized proficiency test, the fourth-year students were divided into two groups: successful students who passed GEM8 and less successful students whose GEM8 scores were below 50. It was found that successful students seemed using more learning strategies than less successful students. In particular, successful students reported using metacognitive strategies significantly more frequently than less successful students...