The Effects Of Language Learning Strategy Training On Junior High School Students' Communicative Competence

In today's global world, English has become increasingly prevalent. Fluency in English is more and more important. Unfortunately communicative competence in English teaching of middle schools in China has not been publicized enough. Many English teachers are interested in how to improve the students' communicative competence in English teaching. This thesis studies the effects of language learning strategy training on middle school students' communicative competence, by briefly reviewing the literature relating to this issue, and focuses on an experiment conducted at Twenty-Six Middle School of Hohhot. The experiment aims at determining whether there are improvements in students' communicative competence after the two months language learning strategy training. The author has concluded that the students could benefit from this language learning strategy training and as a result most students would improve their communicative competence.This study consisted of thirty-two students selected from two intermediate-level classes at Twenty-Six Middle School of Hohhot. Sixteen students were participating in strategy training and the others were a control group with no strategy training. They all received the same language course in two months. Both groups filled out Learning Styles Checklist and SILL (Strategy Inventory for Language Learning) and then performed a series of communication tasks, along with strategy checklists filled out after each task was performed.This thesis looked for correlations between an increase in use of certain language learning strategies and improvement in task performance on a series of scales. Such a link has not been evident from previous research, although reported strategy training was more in broad terms and not linked to any specific tasks.The results of research speak in favor of the strategy training. It is consistent with the initial hypothesis. If teachers systematically introduce and reinforce strategies that can help students communicate more effectively, the students may improve their performance on language tasks. Both of the integrating strategy training directly into the classroom instructional plans and the embedding strategies into dailylanguage tasks were all effective. The experiment provided an effective way to improve middle school students' communicative competence in English. Middle school English teachers may find the results of this thesis beneficial.