A Study Of The Relationship Between Language Learning Strategy Use And Language Proficiency

The study makes an investigation into the language learning strategies used by a group of the third-year English majors from Fujian Teachers University. It aims to find out the preferences for the strategy use among different proficiency groups, to compare the strategy use among them and to examine the relationship between their strategy use and language proficiency. Thus we can understand whether learning strategies are contributory factors towards the improvement of language proficiency so that it can bring some implications and suggestions to foreign language teaching and learning in the teachers universities in China.A quantitative research method and the SILL questionnaire by Oxford (1990) were used in this study. The SPSS (the Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data. The study reveals that compensation, affective and metacognitve strategies receive relatively higher level of usage, while memory, cognitive and social strategies are used less frequently. As for the correlation, the study reveal that the four categories of learning strategies have significant positive correlation to language proficiency level, while social and affective strategies have no significant relation to proficiency. ANOVA is carried out to find out the influence of language proficiency on strategy use. The results show that there is significant variation between the four categories and language proficiency with the exception of affective and social strategies. It means that language proficiency is proved to have a significant effect on cognitive, memory, metacognitive and compensation strategies. It also demonstrates that all these strategies except affective strategies show positive variation. Conclusions can be made from the above results, namely, strategy use and language proficiency are interrelated and interact on each other. The increasing use of learning strategies can make students study more effectively and improve their language proficiency; in the meantime, the improvement of language proficiency can also impel students to use learning strategies more frequently, more properly and more widely. However, the existence of the correlation between the two in present study still can't evidence causality in one particular direction.