A Study Of Language Learning Strategies Of Unsuccessful Learners Among Senior One Students Of A High School

This paper reports on a survey of the language learning strategies used by unsuccessful English learners among senior one students in a high school in Beijing. One purpose of the study was to explore language learning strategies used by unsuccessful senior high school English learners, to find out the relationships between learning strategies and language achievements. An ultimate purpose was eventually to provide profiles for senior high school English teachers aiming at training students in using language learning strategies.This study combined questionnaire with semi-structured interview. The basic instrument was The Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) by Oxford (1990) which consists of 50 questions. The quantitative data were analyzed with the aid of SPSS (Statistic Package for Social Science) 11.0 for Windows and the qualitative data were analyzed according to the six categories of language learning strategies by Oxford (1990).The results showed that though the subjects were not so successful in their learning, their levels of strategy use were not very low, averaging 2.81. Among the six categories of strategies, social and compensation strategies were the most used, while metacognitive and memory strategies were the least used. The results also showed that all the six categories of SILL were significantly associated with each other, but none of the six categories of strategies was correlated with language achievements. The results have implications for both instruction and further research.The study recommended that future research on topics similar to this study be conducted on a larger sample involving a wider range of different high schools learning English as a foreign language, employing multiple data collection procedures, to promote senior high school students' English learning and to help teachers provide more efficient English teaching.