An Investigation Of Language Learning Strategies Used By High School Students: Gender, Proficiency And Test Performance

In the mid 1970s, language teachers and researchers began to realize that no single language teaching method guaranteed success for every student. They began to shift their attention from teaching process to learning process. The way how language learners monitor their learning processes has become one of the major research interests ever since then. These processes are generally referred to as learning strategies and are considered as very important factors influencing students' second language achievement.Against this background, this study investigated the relationship between learning strategy preferences and National Matriculation English Test (NMET) performance of Chinese EFL senior high school students. Participant consisted of 346 third-year senior high school students from Shandong Province in China. Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) was administered as measures of learning strategy preferences. This study was designed to provide information on the types and frequency of learning strategies used by Chinese high school students and which types of learning strategies seem to be beneficial to "good" test performance and which do not.Descriptive statistical analyses indicated that in general these high school students used all the six types of learning strategies. Compensation, metacognitive and cognitive strategies received relatively higher level of employment, while affective, memory and social strategies were reported to be used less frequently.Results of ANOVA analysis revealed that more proficient students appeared to use learning strategies more frequently than less proficient students. Independent-samples t-test indicated that female students adopted more learning strategies with significantly greater frequency than males.Correlation analyses showed that the use of learning strategy was positively significantly correlated to language performance. A multiple regression analysisrevealed that about 24% of the variation in NMET scores was explained by the combination of three strategy categories measured by the SILL, namely, cognitive strategies, metacognitve strategies, and memory strategies.Such findings may provide teachers with a better understanding of the types and frequency of learning strategies used by high school students and help them to incorporate effective strategy training into classroom practice for more autonomous and effective learning. Findings here also indicate that it is important to recognize that some strategies may be more suited to some learners than to others. The more teachers know about such factors, the more readily they can come to grips with the nature of individual differences in the classroom.Findings in this study also emphasize the importance of providing adequate opportunities for students to engage actively in authentic communicative tasks in the classroom. To advance rapidly toward proficiency, high school students should be encouraged to take risk and provided with enough opportunities to practice using the language in accomplishing communication-oriented tasks.