THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES OF A SAMPLE OF P.R.C. TERTIARY-LEVEL STUDENTS

Abstract

This paper reports a study of the language learning strategies of 265 Chinese EFL learners at the tertiary-level in the P.R. China. The aims of the study were to survey the kinds of learning strategy used by Chinese tertiary-level EFL learners and to investigate the influence of proficiency level, gender, and field of specialization on strategy use. A three-part questionnaire was administered. Part I of the questionnaire contained 12 items to obtain background information on the respondents. Part II was the SILL (Strategy Inventory for Language Learning) by Oxford (1990). Part III contained six open-ended questions to collect the respondents' descriptive data on their own learning strategies. In order to obtain more detailed information about the learners, in particular, their personal insights about learning strategies, the questionnaire was supplemented by interviews with six of the respondents to the questionnaire. These six respondents were of different gender, different proficiency level as defined by the criterion measure, and different fields of study. The SILL instrument consisted of six categories: memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, affective, and social. Results from the survey indicated that compensation strategies were most frequently used, while memory strategies were least frequently used. Statistical analyses showed that significant differences were found in the use of memory, metacognitive, and affective strategies among learners of two proficiency levels. Gender had no statistically significant effect on the choice of strategies. Statistical significance was found for differences in field of specialization. Furthermore, the results of the open-ended questions in Part III of the questionnaire together with the data of interviews yielded several strategies employed by Chinese EFL learners as a complement to the SILL. This report concludes with recommendations for how teachers can use the findings to plan and design strategy-training so as to help learners become more independent and responsible for their own learning. Recommendations are also made for helping teachers to diversify their teaching mode to facilitate the learning of English as a foreign language for communicative competence.