An Investigation Of English Learning Strategy Employed By Senior Middle School Students In Zhanjiang City

Over the past three decades, learning strategy has been a focus in the field of SLA and psychology. Researchers in China began to touch upon this issue in early 1980s, and more studies have been done in this field since 1990s. Like studies abroad, researches made in China have attempted to investigate the function of learning strategies in the process of English learning, and factors that affect use of learning strategies. However, most previous studies focused on college students, yet studies on middle school students are still very scarce.Despite some interesting findings found in strategy use among middle school students, most studies were carried out among urban students, little research has thus far been done to look into the differences between urban and rural students. Considering the current situations of urban-rural differences in education in China, the present study sets out to find out whether there are differences between urban and rural students in strategy use in their English learning.A total of 239 senior two students from four middle schools in Zhanjiang city participated in the study. All the participants had just taken the unified end-of-term examination administered by the Education Office of Zhanjiang city in July 2005. Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) was adopted to collect information on the students' individual background and learning strategy use. Under investigation were such variables as participants' urban-rural locale, gender and achievement levels.The investigation revealed the following findings. First, urban students employ cognitive and social strategies more frequently than rural students. In addition, social strategy used by rural students fell in the low level, which indicates that rural students generally do not use social strategies. Second, urban students reported a wider range of strategies compared with their rural peers. Third, among students of intermediate achievement, urban students employ more social strategies than their rural peers, while rural students use affective strategy significantly more often than their urban counterparts. Fourth, the comparison of like gender groups revealed that urban malestudents reported more often use of cognitive and social strategies than their rural peers. For female students, however, significant difference was found only in use of social strategies, with urban female reporting higher frequency use.The study from rural/urban perspective and its findings will no doubt contribute to the research of language learning strategy and help enrich strategy research in China. The attempt to investigate strategy use addressing the rural education issue in China will also provide implications for English teaching in middle schools, especially in rural middle school settings. In addition, differences in strategy use between urban and rural students revealed in this study will shed some light on the implementation of strategy training among middle school students under the guideline of the new Curricula.