The Comparative Study Of English Learning Strategies Between Achievers And Underachievers In Junior High School

In recent years, whether we can have a good command of learning strategies has become a ruler to judge how to learn and how to think. The pedagogical and psychological researchers have realized that the essential goal of education is to cultivate students to become independent, autonomous and efficient learners. In the mid1970s, there was a great shift in the focus of language research from what to teach to how to learn, for many language researchers and teachers started to realize that there was no single language teaching methodology that can guarantee the success for every student. Many researches on learning strategies mainly focused on:the definition and classification of language learning strategies; the features of good language learners’ learning strategies; the differences in the use of learning strategies between successful and unsuccessful learners; the relationship between the use of learning strategies and language learning proficiency; factors that affect the use of language learning strategies; the training of language learning strategies and its effects. Researches on learning strategies at home dated back to1980s. However, both the foreign and domestic researchers mainly focused their studies on language learners at the university or adult level, and few researchers targeted their researches on the students at middle school, especially at junior high school.This paper has employed "the valuable diagnostic tool" Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), proposed by Oxford, to make an empirical study on learning strategies of210students in Hou Guanzhai Junior High School. It aims at investigating the general characteristics of learning strategies adopted by achievers and underachievers, detecting the differences in the use of strategies between achievers and underachievers in junior high school, and examining the relationship between their uses of English learning strategies and English learning achievements.The results manifest that the use of English learning strategies of achievers and underachievers in junior high school is at a moderate level on the whole, and the learning strategies employed most frequently by these students are affective strategies, followed by metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, social strategies and compensation strategies, with memory strategies the least frequently used. With regard to the differences in learning strategies use between achievers and underachievers, there exist evident distinctions between achievers and underachievers in the use of English learning strategies:achievers can practice the learning strategies better than underachievers on the whole, and the significant differences of achievers and underachievers on the use of learning strategies lie in cognitive, affective and social strategies from T-value test. In terms of the relationship between learning strategies employment and English proficiency, all of the six types of learning strategies are positively correlated with the scores of achievers and underachievers, and cognitive and metacognitive strategies indicate significant correlation with the scores of achievers while cognitive and social strategies indicate significant correlation with the scores of underachievers.Such findings might provide English teachers with a better understanding of the types and frequency of English learning strategies that are adopted by these junior high school students, and then to foster their students to be more autonomous and effective language learners.