An Investigation Into The Strategies Of Central Asia Students Learning Chinese In China

Since the1970’s, researchers in the second language learning have shifted theirstudy focus to “How to learn” from “How to teach”. The study of second languagelearning strategy is gradually becoming one of the important parts of the secondlanguage acquisition study. More and more research of language strategies of secondlanguage learners from different aspects have done. With the “Chinese fever” spreading,the number of foreign students from central Asia is increasing. The average rate ofincrease is75.5%, which accounts for31.8%of the total number of foreign students.The mother languages of students from central Asia belong to Indo-European languageand Altai language family, which has great difference with Chinese in pronunciation,vocabulary, grammar and characters. The research on Chinese learning strategies ofstudents from Central Asia is helpful to both researchers and Chinese teachers to helpthe students find better learning strategies more efficiently.This thesis reviews the relative literature on second language learning strategies athome and abroad, and then adopted the Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for languagelearning (1990) to do a questionnaire survey, with face-to-face interviews to identify theChinese learning strategies used by Central Asia students. This thesis also discussed theoverall use situation, influence factors and efficiency of Chinese learning strategies ofCentral Asia students. By using SPSS statistical software, this thesis analyzed the dataof questionnaire.The survey result shows that, the students from central Asia use social strategiesmostly, and then compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies,affective strategies and memory strategies accordingly. Sex difference has littleinfluence on strategies using. Since the age differences among these central Asiastudents are very small, they have little influence on strategies using, either. DifferentChinese learning time has obvious influences on strategies choosing.On the basis of this study, this thesis made some suggestions about how to teachChinese as a foreign language, hoping to provide references for both Chinese learnersand teachers.