A Study Of Language Learning Strategies For Oral English Used By English Majors In A Vocational College

With rapid technological and social changes, modern language teaching has moved from traditional approaches to various versions of communicative methodology. However, although an abundance of attractive and authentic language-teaching materials have appeared as a result of this trend, there has been an ever-growing concern that learners have not made as much progress as might have anlicipated. In response lo the methodological issues, applied linguistics aimed lo explore what is inside the 'black box' of the human brain so that teachingmelhods might be designed lo facililate rather than hinder the learning process. From the 1960s with the advances in the areas of general linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, the research emphasis of second language acquisition began to shift from teaching lo learning, from the teacher to the learner. Part of this research focused on 'the good language learners' and what strategies they adopted to besuccessful.Since the middle of 1970s, a great many of constructive studieshave been conducted on the description, classification and function of learning strategies employed by learners in the learning process. Some researchers have tried to prove that training in strategies is the facilitator of learner autonomy. However, learning strategics are not absolutely good for all learners in all contexts; factors affecting strategy use have more or less been neglected. On the one hand, although there has been an increasing amount of interest in the studies on students' learning strategies for the English—majors' in university, there were very few studies on the English majors in vocational college, especially for their spoken English learning strategies; on the other hand, the English majors in vocational college are badly in need of improving their poor oral English in order to catch more job opportunities in future.For these reasons, the current study tried to explore the following three problems:1. What is the frequency of overall oral English strategies used by English majors in a vocational college?2. What is the frequency of each strategy category used by the subjects?3. What is the difference between high- and low- achievers in using the individual oral strategies?The questionnaire survey was used in the study. It involved 98 second-year students of English major from Shanwei Vocational andTechnology College in Guangdong Province. In this study, the written questionnaire was designed on the basis of Oxford's design of SILL. It was composed of two parts, respectively, the background of the respondents and checklist of strategies. The strategics included six groups: memory strategies, cognitive strategies, compensation strategics, affective strategies, social strategies and metacognitive strategies. With the help of the statistical software SPSS 10.0, the descriptive statistics such as frequencies and percentages were used to analyze the responses to the questionnaire. In addition, in order to understand whether high achievers and low achievers varied in the use of oral learning strategies, the T-lest was also employed to examine whether there were statistically significant differences in their use of LLS.In terms of frequency of overall oral English strategies, the mean in the present study was 3.09. It suggested that our subjects in vocational college were all active strategy users.With respect to the frequency of each strategy category, compensation strategies was reported as being used the most frequently, while social strategies was the least frequently used.Concerning the difference between high- and low- achievers in using the individual oral strategics, it was apparent that the high achievers used some individual strategies more frequently than low achievers.Based on the above findings, this study provided some insightful implications: first of all, to cultivate students' strategy awareness; secondly, to encourage students to speak out; thirdly, to supervise and manage spoken English learning; fourthly, to make full use of chances to speak English; and (he lastly, to learn more learning strategies.Like all empirical studies, this study suffered from limitations though it was designed carefully: first, the scale of the study was not very large; second, grouping high and low achievers may be not rigorous enough; third, the checklists may not been submitted to rigorous reliability and validity checks; and finally, I didn't touch the field concerning how to improve the subjects' speaking abilities in English.Therefore, the results obtained in the present study are left to be improved and it is hoped that further research will lead to more overall and accurate results.