An Empirical Study Of College Non-English Majors' English Learning Strategy

Since 1970s,there has been a shift of emphasis in foreign language teaching and research from seeking for the best teaching method to investigating the learners.With the further development of research on foreign language teaching and learning, researchers have realized that among various factors,foreign language learning strategy is one of the crucial factors to foreign language learning.Foreign language learning strategy can help students learn foreign language more effectively.Since the mid-1980s,some Chinese researchers have begun to study language learning strategies in a foreign language setting.However,most of the subjects in the previous researches are English majors while at present the majority of English foreign language learners in colleges and universities are non-English majors.Therefore it is necessary to investigate into those non-English majors in colleges and universities.Based on theories of previous researches,such as Oxford and Wen' theories in foreign language learning strategies,the research on English learning strategies used by college non-English majors is carried out in Dalian Maritime University.Quastionnaire and interview are adopted in this study.The characteristics and categories of English learning strategies used by the subjects are investigated.Differences between successful English learners and less successful English learners as well as the relationship between the use of English learning strategies and test performance are analyzed.The study shows that college non-English majors have their own English learning strategy categories.They are social strategies,form-focus strategies,memory strategies, cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies,compensation strategies and using mother-tongue strategies.Students with high English test scores have a better command over English learning strategies than those with low English scores.There are significant differences in using English learning strategies between the two groups of students.English test performance correlates positively with such English learning strategies as social strategies,form-focus strategies,memory strategies,cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies and compensation strategies,while using mother-tongue strategies have a negative correlation with English test performance.In the last section,pedagogical implications and limitations and of this study are discussed.Finally suggestions for further researches are proposed.