Effects Of Gender And L2Proficiency On The Use Of Language Learning Strategies By Non-English Majors In Chin

During the past few decades, focus of research in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has shifted from teacher-centered studies to the learner-centered ones, thus leads to a growing appreciation of the importance and necessities of learners’learning process and a increasing number of investigations on learners’ language learning strategies. Though numerous existing studies regarding language learning strategies have been focused on the various factors that may affect the use of language learning strategies, like motivation, age, intelligence, gender, self-efficacy belief, L2proficiency and learning environment, etc.. Only parts of them investigated the relationships among gender, L2proficiency level and the use of language learning strategies. Among the limited numbers of studies both at home and abroad investigating the influence of gender and proficiency level on the use of language learning strategies, none of them was able to explore the interactive effects of these two factors on strategy use.Therefore, the present study is designed to fill this gap. Besides, two other research questions will also be explored, analyzed and discussed in the present study, i.e. what are the most frequently used language learning strategies by all participants? What are the respective main effects of gender and proficiency level on language learning strategies? In order to answer these three questions, revised SILL questionnaires were distributed to171non-English major participants who had taken the CET4exams from three universities (one is a liberal-arts university, the other two are science and engineering universities). Finally120participants’questionnaire data were used for the present study, including30female and30male learners whose CET-4scores were above580,30female and30male learners whose CET-4scores were below440. Data were recorded and analyzed in SPSS16.0. Results indicated that1) the order of preference of all strategy categories by participants is compensation strategy, cognitive strategy, metacognitive strategy, social strategy, memory strategy and affective strategy in sequence;2) both gender and proficiency level have respective significant main effects on all strategies:Gender differences exist in all language learning strategies and female learners outperformed male learners in all strategies; learners of high proficiency level used more frequently all the language learning strategies than learners of low proficiency level did and this difference is also significant;3) the interactive effect of gender and proficiency is significant for memory strategy, cognitive strategy, affective strategy and social strategy, but not significant for the other two strategies:compensation and metacognitive strateies, etc. All of these research findings may provide some implications for both the learners and the teachers.