An Investigation Into College Non-English Majors' Application Of Social/Affective Strategies To Their English Learning

Social strategies help learners get more exposure to the language they are learning through interaction, and affective strategies help learners make their emotions, motivations, and attitudes more beneficial for language learning. They both play important roles in language acquisition and the development of learner autonomy, while they seemingly have been neglected in previous research. Investigating learners'application of social and affective strategies into their English learning has great significance for fostering learning autonomy.This paper reports a study that investigates the social and affective strategy use of Chinese non-English majors by answering the following three research questions: Firstly, what are the strategies used most frequently by the learners in the study? Secondly, do frequencies of use and choices of social or affective strategies differ across categories of personality traits, or motivation intensity? Lastly, are social and affective strategies correlated with English proficiency?The answers were explored mainly by means of quantitative method. 151 students of Huazhong University of Science and Technology took part in the study. The questionnaire completed by the subjects consists of three parts: basic information about the subjects, their use of social and affective strategies in the forms of closed-ended and open-structured parts, and the measurements of their personality and motivational intensity. The major findings are as follows:1) Subjects do not use social and affective strategies in high frequencies. Compared with affective strategies, social strategies are used more frequently. Ranked in terms of mean frequency, the affective strategies used frequently by the subjects are self-rewarding, self-encouragement to take risks wisely, and lowering anxiety; the social strategies used frequently are asking for clarification or verification, asking for correction, becoming aware of others'thoughts and feelings, developing cultural understanding.2) Students with extroverted personality traits use the affective strategy of self-encouragement to take risks wisely and the social strategy of cooperating with peers more frequently than students with introverted personality traits to a significant level. Moreover, there exists significant variation in some social and affective strategy use among students with higher, moderate, and lower motivational intensity. Students with higher motivational intensity use the strategies of lowering anxiety, asking for correction, developing cultural understanding more often than those with lower motivational intensity; they also use the strategies of self-encouragement to take risks wisely, asking for clarification or verification, becoming aware of others'thoughts and feelings more frequently than those with moderate or lower motivational intensity. Students with moderate motivational intensity use the strategy of keeping records of feelings in English learning more than those with lower motivational intensity.3) Students'English proficiency correlates negatively with the use of listening to one's body signals. No correlative relationships are found between English proficiency and other social or affective strategies.Finally, suggestions were given according to the results of the investigation, and further researches were proposed to be carried out in order to probe into the effective application of social and affective strategy into English learning.