Chinese ESL Students' Learning Strategies: A Look At Gender And Speciality

Over the last decades there have been increasing number of studies on the notion of learning strategies. And the fact has been uncovered that learning strategies are playing a vital role in achieving successful language learning. The investigation into learning strategies has been conducted concerning all of the four language skills, or any of the four language skills. With regard to the aspect of reading, considerable studies also exist. However, until now most studies are conducted in the West with foreign students learning Indo-European languages as the subjects of the experiments and they are addressed to the issue of the relationship between strategy use and reading proficiency. This situation has stimulated the author's interest to make a further investigation on the untouched areas in this field. The questions addressed in the current study include: 1) What are the characteristics of learning strategies on reading adopted by Non-English majors? 2) Among a spectrum of learning strategies on reading, what strategies correlate more significantly with the outcomes? 3) Whether female students differ from male students in strategy use? 4) Whether Science students differ from Liberal Arts students in their use of reading strategies? Data are collected through a questionnaire survey and reading comprehension test and processed by means of SPSS 10.0. The subjects involved in this study are 168 second-year Non-English majors specializing in Chinese, Library Science, Mathematics and Physics at Hebei University. The main findings are as follows: 1) Chinese non-English majors use reading strategy at a medium or low level. 2) Significant correlations are found between reading proficiency and cognitive strategies, and between reading proficiency and metacognitive strategies. Socioaffective strategies are not significantly correlated with reading proficiency. 3) The results show that female students use more metacognitive and cognitive strategies than male students while male students use more socioaffective reading strategies than female students. 4) In contrast with Science students, Liberal Arts students use some reading strategies more frequently although most of the differences in their use of the reading strategies haven't reached significant level . Some limitations still exist in the current study, but it has yielded someuseful findings which are believed to have implications for reading comprehension learning and teaching...