A Study On English Learning Strategies For Tibetan Non-English Majors

Language learning strategies mainly refer to the learning methods, learning techniques or learning regulations taken by the learners in order to arrive at certain learning goals. As a result of its correlation with the learning efficiency, learning strategies have been an ever-lasting research focus in the field of teaching pedagogy, teaching psychology and learning theories in the past few decades. The focus of world’s foreign language teaching research has experienced the change from "how to teach" to "how to learn", from "the teachers" to "the learners" since the1960s and1970s, thus in this field China has gradually conducted some researches since the1980s and has made certain progresses. However, few of them are about Tibetan non-English majors. Accordingly, the paper aims to calculate and analyze English learning strategies for Tibetan non-English majors in Northwest University for Nationalities, which will provide more solid evidence to the study of language learning strategy on the whole.This paper is an empirical study of language learning strategy training in college English teaching for learners in Northwest University for Nationalities. Its aim are to acquire the English learning strategies adopted by the Tibetan students to improve their English learning through the investigation. According to the design requirement, two classes of the Tibetan non-English majors of freshmen in Northwest University for Nationalities were chosen as the subjects, one was the experimental class (EC) and the other was the control class (CC), all taught by the same teacher-the author. The experiment lasted for about16weeks. In the experiment, the experimental class received language learning strategy training, while the control class received the regular teaching with no strategy training. A questionnaire, a pre-test and a post-test were conducted to collect the relevant data. SPSS16.0for Windows was adopted to analyze the data.The major findings of the study are to prove that language learning strategy training is practical and effective in college English teaching. Data analysis from the results of the pre-test and post-test of the two classes reveals that the achievement of the experimental class is significantly improved and a little in the control class, which suggests that language strategy training exerts some effect on the learners. It’s feasible to introduce the training into college English teaching.The author hopes that the study may help Tibetan students form a good habit of learning, and that these learning strategies may benefit English learners to some extent. Most important of all, the author also hopes the study may provide some insights for further research in the field and its findings may throw some light on the improvement of college English teaching.