A Survey On The English Learning Strategies Of Senior One Students

Teaching the students how to learn is the essence of our contemporary education. Helping students to form good study habits and adopt effective learning strategies is one of the important tasks of the new curriculum. Since 1970s, learning strategies have become a major issue in the education field and attracted more and more scholars'attention both home and abroad. But there is still a lack of empirical researches of learning strategies of EFL learners in senior high schools in a Chinese context.This study aims to investigate the overall level of using language learning strategies by the senior high students in Tianjin Middle School, to examine the differences between more successful learners and less successful learners in strategy use, to study the gender differences in the use of strategies, and to find out if there is any correlation between language proficiency and strategy use. A total of 256 first-year senior high school students from Tianjin Middle School were invited to participate in this survey in October in 2010. The research instruments used in this survey were a written questionnaire based on Oxford's SILL (version 7.0) for ESL/EFL learners and SPSS 16.0 (Statistical Product and Service Solutions) for windows. After analyzing the data, the author gets the following results:1. In general, students sometimes use these language learning strategies and a large number of students report that they have a general idea of what learning strategies are. Compensation strategies are used the most frequently, followed by metacognitive strategies, social strategies, cognitive strategies and affective strategies. Memory strategies are used the least frequently by students.2. The more successful learners are found to have a better command over learning strategies than the less successful learners. The former group use strategies more frequently than the latter group. There exist significant differences in using all these strategies except for compensation strategies between the two groups.3. Girl students use learning strategies more frequently than boys, though there are no significant gender differences in these strategies except for the last strategy category—social strategies.4. The relationship between language proficiency and learning strategies is closely correlated. Among the six learning strategies, metacognitive strategies are especially correlated with language proficiency, which means that higher proficiency learners are more likely to use metacognitive strategies.In the end, the author proposes several implications for English teaching based on the above findings and the limitations of the research are also briefly discussed.