A Study On Grammar Learning Strategies Of Senior High School Students

At present, great achievements have been made in the studies of language learning strategies both at home and abroad. However, little has been done on grammar learning strategies. The reason is that grammar has been degraded greatly in English teaching and learning with the prosperity of Communicative Language Teaching. For a long time, many people think that learning English is just learning speaking, and learning grammar has been out of date. However, the researcher holds that, in the new curriculum background, it is necessary to do some researches on grammar learning, especially on grammar learning strategies, which can provide us with some implications on grammar teaching and learning.Upon the analysis of the research background, the researcher reviewed the literature on grammar learning strategies and designed the research. The study intends to find out: 1. the state of the overall use of grammar learning strategies by senior high school students; 2. the frequency grammar learning strategy use; 3. the relationship between grammar learning strategy use and some individual factors, for example, gender, personality and proficiency of the students; and 4. the deficiencies that senior high school students have in the use of grammar learning strategies. The main research instrument is a questionnaire, which was compiled by mainly referring to the classification of O'Malley and Chamot and the classification of the Criteria of the English Curriculum for Senior High School: Grammar learning strategy is sub-divided into metacognitive, cognitive, resource, affective, and social strategies. The questionnaire has 40 items of questions in the strategy part and the responses are of 5-point Likert Scale. Also, 5 interview questions were designed as the complement to the questionnaire. The survey was carried out among 256 students in 4 senior high schools from 4 provinces and the interview was done among 30 students from one of the 4 schools.By using SPSS11.0, data collected from the questionnaire are processed. The results of the data analysis are as follows: the overall use of grammar learning strategies is in a medium range and most of the students are positive in learning grammar. Affective strategy is of the highest usage, followed by metacognitive, cognitive, social and resource strategy. There is no significant relationship between strategy use and gender or personality. However, there exists a significant relationship between strategy use and students' proficiency. The higher the students' proficiency, the more frequently grammar learning strategies are used by them.In addition, some deficiencies are revealed by the summarization of infrequently used strategies. For instance, the use of social strategy and resource strategy is in a rather low degree. The use of some specific strategies, for example, planning strategy and summarizing strategy, is not high either. Therefore, English teachers are advised to improve the way of grammar teaching, and utilize modern technology and resources to help students become autonomous language learners. Meanwhile, students are suggested forming their own grammar learning system, improving their grammar learning by cooperative learning, and making good use of available learning resources.It should be noted that the study itself has some limitations. For instance, the scale of the questionnaire is rather limited. There may be some deficiencies in the questionnaire itself because its compilation is restricted by many factors. Therefore, further studies should be done on grammar learning strategies.