A Survey Study Of Senior High School Students’ Application Of Affective And Social Strategies To Their English Learning

Foreign language learning is the process of continuous input and output of knowledge.The effects of the input and output must rely on language learners participating in theprocess. Affective strategies can make learners control and adjust their own affection,attitude and motivation in the learning process, which helps learners produce and maintainthe best internal and external learning states. Social strategies can make learners have moreaccess to practicing and using language, enable them to acquire more help from their peers.Affective and social strategies play an important role in the learning English process,which can not be ignored. However, the two strategies have not been received enoughattention in the past study of literature. Making an intensive study of affective and socialstrategies can help to raise students’ awareness of using them and improve theeffectiveness of their learning in English class and extracurricular autonomous learning.A survey was conducted160senior high school students from Nanning NO.28MiddleSchool by employing a combination of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews inorder to investigate the characteristics of affective and social strategies used by senior highschool students, to detect the differences in the use of affective and social strategiesbetween high and low achievement group students, and to examine the correlation betweentheir use of affective and social strategies and English achievement, in the hope ofexploring the contribution of affective and social strategies to English achievement.The research findings are summarized as follows:1.The subjects in the present studydo not use affective and social strategies very often. They sometimes use a range ofaffective strategies in their English learning process. Ranked in the descend order through mean frequency: self-encouragement to take risks wisely, lowering anxiety,self-rewarding, noticing tension, while affective strategies relating to talking about feelingsand writing down one’s feelings are not always used. The social strategies used frequentlyare asking for clarification or verification, cooperating with peers and asking for correction,the rest three social strategies concerning asking for help from English speakers,developing cultural understanding and asking questions in English are performed in lowlevel.2. There are significant differences in the use of affective and social strategiesbetween high achievement group students and low achievement group students. The highachievement group students employ affective and social strategies more frequently thanlow achievement group students.3.Students’ English achievements have positivecorrelations with the use of affective and social strategies except the use of affectivestrategy of writing down one’s feelings, the social strategies of asking others to correct andasking for help from English speakers.Finally, limitations of the present study and suggestions for further study arepresented according to the results of the investigation in this thesis. For instance, thenumber of the samples under investigation and the items in total in the questionnaire arerelatively small, thus further study needs expanding a larger sample and investigating avariety of affective and social strategies; the study investigates affective and socialstrategies’ employment in an EFL setting at a particular point of time, cross-sectional andlongitudinal studies need to be conducted. Therefore, the results obtained in the presentstudy need further testing and improving.