A Correlational Study On Learning Strategies And Spoken English Proficiency Of Non-English Major Postgraduates

In recent years, more and more second language educators tended to be interested in language learning strategies and have done lots of empirical as well as experimental studies on it. But within the author's limited reach of the research literature, empirical studies on the relationship between learning strategies and spoken English proficiency in China are quite few. This study takes non-English major postgraduates as subjects and surveys their situation of strategy use and explores the relationship of learning strategies to their oral proficiency. This research attempted to explore three questions as the following:Firstly, this research attempted to explore the most frequently used learning strategies used by non-English major postgraduates to improve their speaking. The second question is to research the relationship between the learning strategies and the spoken English proficiency. The last one is to explore the difference in the learning strategy use among students of different spoken English level.These questions were explored by means of an English learning strategy questionnaire and a spoken English test. The subjects of this research are 40 non-English major postgraduate students from North University of China. The author gains frequencies, means and standard deviations by SPSS to analyze the situation of the strategy use.The results of the study show that:among the three categories of strategy, management strategies are the most frequently used by the subjects.Meanwhile there is significant correlation coefficient between the overall use of learning strategies and oral proficiency. Among the three categories, management strategies and communication strategies are statistically significant correlated to the spoken English proficiency, but there is no significant correlation coefficient between the language learning strategies and spoken English proficiency. Also the significant differences in the use of management strategies and communication strategies can be seen among students with different oral English proficiency.