A Comparative Study On Strategy Use Between Common High School Students And High School Art Students

This paper presents a comparative study of learning strategies used by common highschool students and high school art students. As previous studies on language learningstrategies focus either only on common students or on art students, this kind of comparativestudy for common students and art students in high school is comparatively rare. In terms ofcomparison, both differences and similarities in strategies use have been discussed andanalyzed in detail. There are totally200subjected in this study of which100are commonhigh school students and100high school art students whose major courses are painting. Theinstrument for data collection is Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (1990),and all the subjects are required to finish the Oxford (1990) SILL questionnaire. In dataanalyzing, there are two steps: making separate analysis for the strategies used by each groupof students; secondly, making comparisons of both differences and similarities in strategiesused between the two groups of students.Theoretical supports of this thesis include Anderson’s adaptive control of thought,Gardner’s social-education theory, Krashen’s monitor theory and Flavell’s metacognitivetheory.The major findings of this study are: From overall perspective, common high schoolstudents employ learning strategies more frequently than high school art students; there isobvious difference in the use of compensation strategy, metacognitive strategy and affectivestrategy between common students and art students; both of the two groups of students usefew memory strategy and cognitive strategy; comparatively speaking, all students use socialstrategy more frequently than most of other learning strategies, whereas there is not muchdifference in terms of the frequency they use of social strategy.Therefore, either teaching art students or teaching common students, it is recommendedthat teachers in high school lay more emphasis on the training of learning strategies,especially of memory strategy and cognitive strategy. As far as memory strategy is concerned,teachers should train their students to use other kinds of memory strategies besides thetraditional mechanical way of memorizing; and for cognitive strategy more time and more training methods should be given to students. For high school art students, there is still somuch work to do on the overall training of learning strategies.