The Study Of The Correlation Between Learners' Beliefs And Their Learning Strategy Use Under Certain Environmental And Background Factors-A Partial Correlation Analysis On The Survey Of Non-English Majors At Tertiary Level In China

With the development of the research on individual learners' variables, an increasing number of studies suggested that learners' beliefs about language learning have a profound effect on their use of learning strategy. Yet not many empirical studies have been done on the relationship between these two variables. This thesis examined how learners' language learning beliefs are related to their learning strategy use under certain environmental and background factors, that is, from one certain specific task—writing, to explore some possible correlation between Chinese non-English majors' beliefs about language learning and their learning strategies at tertiary level. The research was carried out among a hundred non-English major sophomores in NPU through a questionnaire survey concerning students' language learning beliefs and writing strategy use. By means of SPSS software and the partial correlation analysis, the current study generated three significant findings: 1) Chinese EFL learners in general held a variety of beliefs about language learning. Among the six belief dimensions, the students generally agreed on self-management and meaning-focused beliefs and disagreed on mother-tongue reliance beliefs; 2) writing strategies employed by the students demonstrated the medium frequency level according to Oxford's scales with compensation strategies most often used in writing, and metacognitive and social-affective strategies used least frequently; 3) self-efficacy beliefs were positively related to almost all strategy categories, except for compensation strategies; mother-tongue reliance beliefs were directly proportional to the overall strategies, memory strategies, metacognitive strategies and compensation strategies; meaning-focused beliefs were negatively correlated to metacognitive strategies and social-affective strategies, while form-focused beliefs were conversely proportional to memory strategies; self-management beliefs were linked to cognitive strategies. Upon the above results, this thesis urged to combine the studies of the two variables under certain environmental and background factors with the purpose of providing a new perspective for the research on learning strategy and individual differences as well as some implications for college English teaching in China.