An Investigation On Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Use Of Language Learning Strategies And English Achievement

Rubin(1975) and A, B, C were the first ones who started the research of secondlanguage learning strategy in the1970s, since then it has become the focus and emphasisof this field. Especially in recent20years, researchers pay more and more attention to thecultivation of students’ lifelong learning ability. What’s more, in the New CurriculumReform2011, the primary and middle school curriculum has made it clear that theproficiency of learning strategy has also become the important content of the wholecurriculum objectives. From then on, research in language learning strategy increasinglywins the attention of the people, and research on correlation between language learningstrategy and final score is one of the most popular and important topics.Therefore, this study, taking senior-one students from the Ganzhou No1middleschool in Jiangxi province as subjects, aims at exploring the correlation between thestudents’ use of language learning strategy and their English achievement. In order toachieve the study purpose,5questions are put forward:1. How do senior high school students use the language learning strategies in theirprocess of English learning?2. Do the type of learning strategy used by senior high school students related totheir English achievements?3. Are there any significant differences in the use of language learning strategybetween male and female students?4. Are there any significant differences in the use of language learning strategybetween art major and science major students?5. Do high English achievers use different learning strategies from low Englishachievers?In this study,200senior-one students from Ganzhou No.1middle school wererandomly picked out as subjects. The language learning strategy taxonomy (SILL)compiled by Oxford, after proper revising, was adopted to investigate students’ use oflearning strategy, and2013final English examination held by8senior high schools inGanzhou is used to collect subjects’ scores. After all the data were collected, SPSS17.0 software was employed to deal with and analyze the data, which contribute to detailedinvestigation of the correlation between the use of language learning strategy and Englishachievement.The main results are as follows:1. The frequency of the overall strategy’s use of senior high students arrives at themedium level, and among all the six learning strategies, we can find out that the meanscore of compensation strategy is the highest, then comes to the cognitive strategy, socialstrategy and metacognitive strategy, at last, the frequency level of memory strategy andeffective strategy are the lowest of all.2. There is extremely significant correlation between the overall band score andmemory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive and social strategy, and there issignificant correlation between overall band score and effective strategy.3. The listening&reading score are significantly related with the use of eachlanguage learning strategy.4. The writing score are also significantly related with the use of each languagelearning strategy.5. Apart from social strategy, there is no significant difference in the use of other5typess of language learning strategies between male and female students.6. Apart from compensation strategy, there is no significant difference in the use ofother5kinds of language learning strategies between art and science major students.7. There is significant difference in all of6kinds of language learning strategiesbetween high and low English achievers.In the last chapter of this paper, some implications on senior students’ learning styleand English teachers’teaching are summarized：1. Teachers’ teaching conception and methods need to be changed（1）Change their teaching concept and focus on the cultivation of the students’learning strategy.（2） Embed the theory and training method of language learning strategy into theteaching and learning process timely and artfully which makes students learn itunconsciously. （3）Communicate with students more often and more timely, get to know therelative factors of why students choose and use such kinds of learning strategies and theninstruct them according to their aptitude.2. Students’ learning conception and methods need to be changed（1）Students should change their own learning conception from passive recipientsto active learners.（2）Students should position themselves as the subject of learning to cultivate theirabilities of self-monitoring and self-evaluation（3）Students should form the autonomous learning method which fit themselves3. Some suggestions for language learning strategy’s cultivation（1）First and foremost, students should know the concepts and significance oflanguage learning strategy.（2） Then students and teachers should more cooperate with each other to diagnosetheir own use of language learning strategy in the light with the Strategy Inventory forLanguage Learning compiled by Oxford.（3）Finally, teachers should help students to choose the optimal language learningstrategy on the basis of the second step, and then they should plan some activities to trainthe cultivation of such language learning strategies.What’s more, some suggestions on how to cultivate efficient language learningstrategy are put forward as well. Then there are still some insufficiencies existed in thisstudy, and future research direction is indicated at last.