A Case Study Of English Learning Strategies Of Science Students In Senior Grade Three

Research into language learning strategies abroad began in the 1960s, so did the Chinese research from the beginning of the 1980s.Nowadays there is a shift from the teacher center to the student center.The new English Course Standard advocates that one of the main aims in education is to help individuals to acquire the skills of self-directed learning and to equip learners for a long life education.Getting a better understanding of students' learning process is becoming more and more important.This thesis deals with a case study on the four science students inside and outside English classes for a whole year in Senior Grade Three in Xiang Long Middle School in Changsha county.Unable to observe the evidence of the students,we relied on the indirect evidence from a questionnaire and interviews,in which we mainly referred to Oxford's learning strategies and used as theoretical foundation of our thesis.The circumstances of students' English learning were presented by means of journals,interviews and the data of the tables.By analyzing the four students' learning habits and behaviors in English learning and from the perspective of learning psychology and the ability of physiological memory,we found the following characteristics of the four science students in language learning strategies.They got accustomed to doing problem-solving exercises and transferred it exactly to English learning without awareness of the key feature of language learning and any more use of memory strategies.They laid more emphasis on and used more logic thinking and deduction in English learning which was frequently seen in science subjects because the formulas in maths and physics were always reasoned out.They preferred to read English visually,just content with their comprehensive input which they thought they had mastered. They memorized and forgot about new words very quickly,at which time they were not expert at timely.and frequent revision.All these smart strategies misled the students who thought that English could be learned well without learning chunks and sentence patterns by heart.Because their English was left behind,they either failed in the NMET or couldn't go to important universities as they wished.Their unconsciousness and gaps in English learning strategies stopped them from making any progress,leading to their low efficiency and lagging far behind in English learning even if they devoted much more time and effort to it.A conclusion was drawn from it that these science students would make no progress if they didn't use better strategies in English learning in such a pressing time-Senior Grade Three.The purpose of this thesis is to enhance the consciousness of this kind of students and to alert themselves to the gaps in their English learning strategies,meanwhile let the English teachers who teach science classes realize the characteristics of the science students clearly so that they can conduct training on learning strategies.Make science students assess their English learning actively and properly so that they can adopt various techniques according to the variation of subjects and draw on many approaches to English learning.