The Effects Of Gender-based Learning Strategy Training On Senior High School Students’ English Proficiency

It has long been claimed that gender differences do exist in language learning.Language learning strategies, an important part of language learning, have been a hottopic of study since the1970s. Teachers and researches find that generally speaking,female students have higher English proficiency and they seem to make more use oflearning strategies. It has been acknowledged that strategy use can have effects onimproving language learning proficiency. The current study is carried out for thepurposes of identifying gender differences in strategy use and helping both male andfemale students to achieve more.The procedure of the study is described as follows:Firstly, a questionnaire is distributed to the subjects in the experimental groupand the control group. There are altogether42boys and41girls in these two groups,all coming from Class One, Senior Three and Class Five, Senior Three, Wuxi No.3Senior High School. The questionnaire is completed in class with special caution andearnestness so that the results can be more reliable and valid. The results are analyzedby SPSS20.0to find out answers to the three research questions about generallearning strategies by male learners in senior high school, general learning strategiesby female learners in senior high school and the similarities and differences inlearning strategies by male learners and female learners. Further analysis is conductedto explore the correlation between strategy use and language proficiency.Secondly, gender-based strategy training is designed, mainly focused on thedifferences in learning strategies by male and female learners. According to theanalysis of the results of the questionnaire, boys and girls use learning strategies at a medium level. Among all the six categories of learning strategies, boys makeobviously less use of memory strategies, cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategiesand social strategies while girls, though using all strategies more often than boys,employ affective strategies comparatively the least. So in the experimental group,relative strategy training is conducted, but more attention is paid to boys in memorystrategies, cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies and social strategies whilemore importance is attached to girls in affective strategies. The period of training lasts6weeks.Thirdly, before the questionnaire is given out, a pre-test is conducted to the twogroups. After the training, a second test, that is, a post-test, follows to help understandwhether the strategy training is effective and to answer the last research question: Towhat extent can gender-based strategy training improve senior high school EFLlearners’ English proficiency?The analysis of the two tests yields the following findings:First and foremost, generally speaking, both boys and girls in the two groups areat a medium level in terms of learning strategy use. For male learners, among the sixstrategies examined, cognitive strategies, compensation strategies, metacognitivestrategies are used at a medium level while memory strategies, affective strategies andsocial strategies at a low level.In addition, female learners make use of all six strategies at a medium level.Comparatively speaking, affective strategies are least used.Finally, after the gender-based strategy training in the experimental group, asignificant difference occurs in both male and female learners’ proficiency while inthe control group without such training, no obvious difference is found in the researchsubjects’ proficiency. Thus, a conclusion can be made that gender-based strategytraining is supposed to be helpful for improving senior high school EFL learners’proficiency to some extent.On the basis of these findings, some suggestions are put forward: (1) Teachers should help identify students’ strategy use and help them understand thatif they can find the most proper strategies, they have the potential to make moreimprovement.(2) Teachers should introduce some knowledge about how and where these learningstrategies can be better employed. It is more important to teach them how to learnrather than tell them what to learn.(3) Teachers should give students more freedom and opportunities to make use of thestrategies they are aware of so that they can constantly adapt their strategy use andfinally get the ones most suitable for them.(4) Teachers should never ignore the significance of self-assessment. Therefore, theyshould remind their students to make self-assessment about their strategy use.