A Correlational Study On Senior High School Students’ Beliefs About English Language Learning And Their Use Of Language Learning Strategies

At abroad, many researches have been done on learners’ beliefs about language learningand learners’ use of learning strategies from different perspectives. However, the study onlearners’ beliefs and learners’ strategy use started rather late in China. Very few studies havebeen done on senior high school students to investigate the relationship between learners’beliefs about language learning and their use of language learning strategies. Investigatingstudents’ beliefs about language learning and their relationship with more specific areas suchas language learning strategies can provide us with valuable sources of insight into thelanguage learning process, which can help teachers understand the learning needs of students,clear up students’ negative beliefs, promote students’ learning methods and efficiency,facilitate the successful language learning and improve the students’ language performance.The present study investigated the relationship between Chinese senior high school students’beliefs about English language learning and their use of language learning strategies, whichprovides guidelines and instructions for the high school English education.A sample of241Chinese EFL learners who were all senior high school students fromNo.18Middle School participated in this study. The instruments in this study were twomodified Chinese version questionnaires. The first instrument was the Beliefs aboutLanguage Learning Inventory (BALLI) developed by Horwitz (1987). And the secondinstrument was the Chinese adaptation of Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for LanguageLearning (SILL). The gathered data from the BALLI and the SILL was then analyzed usingStatistical Package for Social Science (SPSS)16.0to explore the relationship betweenstudents’ beliefs about language learning and their use of language learning strategies.Descriptive statistics, including means, standard deviations, and percentages of responses andlevel of frequency, were computed to summarize the students’ responses to the BALLI andSILL items.Regarding learners’ beliefs about English language learning, it was found that theparticipants held beliefs in the following order: Nature of language learning, Learning andcommunication strategies, Motivations and expectations, Difficulty of language learning, Foreign language aptitude. The highest mean belonged to the “Nature of language learning”(M=3.62), while the lowest mean belonged to the “Foreign language aptitude”(M=3.02).Generally, the grand mean of all34items was3.32which indicated that participants heldoptimistic and positive beliefs about English language learning at a medium level.With respect to language learning strategy use, the results demonstrated that theselearners were low to medium strategy users. The results of the study showed the followinglanguage learning strategy ranking: Metacognitive strategies, Compensation strategies,Cognitive strategies, Affective strategies, Social strategies and Memory strategies. Thehighest mean belonged to the “Metacognitive strategies”(M=2.93), while the lowest meanbelonged to the “Memory strategies”(M=2.43). Furthermore, the grand mean of all50itemswas2.65which indicated that the participants of the study used language learning strategiesat a moderate level.Pearson r correlations and Regressions were used to explore the relationship betweenlearners’ beliefs about English language learning and their use of language learning strategies.The results of the study revealed that there was a significant positive relationship betweenparticipants’ beliefs about English language learning and their use of language learningstrategies. Hence, it can be inferred that language learners with more positive and strongerbeliefs about English language learning used more language learning strategies. Among thefive categories, learners’ beliefs about “foreign language aptitude”,“the difficulty of languagelearning”,“the nature of language learning” and “motivation and expectations” were found tohave significant influence on the choice of language learning strategies. That is to say, themore optimistic and stronger the students’ beliefs were in these categories, the morefrequently and effectively they used language learning strategies.