A Study Of English Learning Strategies Used By Junior Middle School Students In Qingdao

Learning strategies play a very important role in the learning efficiency of students. Meanwhile, learning strategies are necessary conditions of promoting students'study, and also are the important methods for school educators need to grasp. At present, there are many thorough studies which have been done by many famous experts and scholars in this field although they have different definitions of learning strategies and different ways to classify them. One of the most popular way to classify language learning strategies were given by Oxford who divided them into six strategies: Affective strategies, Cognitive strategies, Compensation strategies, Memory Strategies, Meta-cognitive Strategies and Social strategies. English, as a worldwide language, is taught systematically in junior middle schools in China. Thus, this study is designed to investigate the influence of grade and gender on the use of English learning strategies by junior middle school students in Qingdao. 171 junior students from Qingdao No.39 middle school took part in this research. The subjects are required to complete two self-reported questionnaires, namely, Background Characteristics and Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL). The collected data are computed and analyzed via descriptive statistics, t-test, and one-way ANOVA. The findings are summed up as follows: (1) No significant differences exist among the subjects in the use frequency of each strategy, all in medium-level. (2) Statistically significant differences are only found in the use of meta-cognitive strategies with regard to grade. (3) Statistically significant differences are not found in the use of six language learning strategies and overall strategies in terms of grade, while some differences do exist in the use of language strategy. At the end, the pedagogical implications are discussed.