Indirect Learning Strategies And College Students' Oral Development

In the process of training Chinese college students' abilities of listening, reading, speaking, writing and translating, it is hard to enable students to utter several English words. Generally speaking, Chinese college students are always reluctant to speak English under the long-lasting influence of traditional education system; therefore, the oral development of Chinese college students has made little achievement so far.This study investigates indirect learning strategy use of college students during their oral production and the corresponding effect of strategy training on college students' oral development. Thirty students from Shaanxi Normal University participated in this study which involves an indirect learning strategy training. The instruments include a questionnaire survey, before and after training oral tests, and learning diaries.The categorization of indirect learning strategies is based on Oxford's taxonomy of learning strategy system which includes metacognitive strategy, affective strategy and social-cultural strategy. The application of those strategies was trained to an oral class to cope with distinctive oral tasks. Then, an analysis, based on the statistics collected form questionnaires and oral tests combined with the description of the learning diaries, was used to see the correlation between applications of the indirect learning strategies and grammatical correctness, fluency and comprehensibility of oral development on college students.Finally, the empirical study bears the outcomes as follows: (1) correlation between applications of the indirect learning strategies and oral development is positive; (2) the application of both affective strategy and social-cultural strategy increased sharply than that of the metacognitive strategy after training; (3) Both fluency and comprehensibility of students' oral development enhanced tremendously after the training.This study is a small step forward in indirect learning strategy training in a Chinese college students' oral production. It can serve as a reference for Chinese college English teachers to conduct their courses more successfully in the future with a better oral development of Chinese college students.