A Study Of English Learning Beliefs And Strategies By Rural Senior High School Students

As SLA (Second Language Acquisition) develops, the focus of foreign language teaching and learning studies has shifted from teaching to learning, especially learning processes. Studies suggested that successful language learners hold positive attitude towards English learning and have developed a wide range of Language Learning Strategies. Although there have been innumerous studies on Language Learning Beliefs and Language Learning Strategies home and abroad, there was no comprehensive study of rural high school students. As one of the three core subjects in senior high schools, English plays a decisive role in the student's future, but their learning efficiency are far from satisfying. At the same time, with the change of teacher's role from imparting knowledge to facilitating and helping learning, having a good understanding of the learner's beliefs and strategy use has become crucial. Therefore, this paper is intent to survey the rural senior high school students'Language Learning Beliefs and Language Learning Strategies and detect their major learning problems.The subjects were192students from Wuxiang No.1Middle School in Wuxiang, a small county of Shanxi Province. The main findings include seven aspects.(1) Their English learning was neither efficient nor enjoyable, as even after many years'learning, most students still could not pass the exams and they couldn't recall much happy learning experience.(2) They were passive learners, limiting their English exposure to the classroom and textbooks and depending on the teachers for the arrangement of their English study.(3) They mainly engaged in rote learning instead of meaningful learning. They seldom made use of their known linguistic and non-linguistic information to attach the new knowledge. They paid little attention to reviewing, practicing, and applying the learned linguistic knowledge in context to change knowledge into skills and competence.(4) English was difficult to them. They attributed their low-efficiency to lack of unavailable best learning method and weak foundations. They employed a limited range of strategies.(5) They learned English with the pressure of distinguishing themselves from others in the National Entrance Examination. They seldom co-operated or exchanged learning feelings with their peers.(6) They paid too much attention to correction and worried about making errors in their language production.(7) They were very dependent on their mother tongue and gave not much attention to culture learning in their English learning.Hopefully these students should have their own arrangement of their learning based on a good understanding of their own learning difficulty and need, so that they could strengthen their foundations of basic linguistic knowledge and skills and find their best learning method to develop communicative competence. At the same time, the suggestion of adjusting negative affections and broadening thought-action repertoire was provided to the students. On the other hand, strategy training, task-based teaching, unthreatening atmosphere were suggested to the teachers to make their learning more meaningful, successful and enjoyable.