A Comparative Study Of EFL Learning Strategies Of Science Students And Arts Students In China

In the past few decades,educational research has shifted its focus from “how to teach” to “how to learn,” and has identified a number of factors in researches,which could explain the differences in the way of students' language learning.Researchers in the field of applied linguistics have found that language learning is also influenced by learner individual factors.A large number of domestic and foreign researchers had studied of these factors,and summarized eight learner factors,including learning strategies.Therefore,the study of learning strategies has received extensive attention in recent years and has become a hot topic in language learning research.In 1989,Oxford suggested that the professional field may be one of the factors related to the choice of foreign language learning strategies.Since then,major difference has been seen as an important factor in the study of foreign language.So far,a large number of researchers have studied the relationship between professional fields and foreign language learning strategies,but these studies are basically conducted in foreign countries,and there are few studies conducted in China.Moreover,most of the researches only pay attention to the differences in foreign language learning strategies of learners from different majors.Few studies have focused on how the strategies used by foreign language learners will change before professional learning and after professional learning at a certain time.This research takes the arts and sciences students in a Chinese university as the subject,and collects data on the use of foreign language learning strategies of freshmen and sophomores in arts and science majors through questionnaires,and analyzes the data to find out the most commonly used foreign language learning strategies of arts and science students,and after a year and a half of college study,the differences between the arts students and science students in the use of foreign language learning strategies.This paper uses Oxford's questionnaire on foreign language learning strategies published in 1995 and questionnaires for basic information to collect data,and then use SPSS software for data analysis.This research totally collected 175 questionnaires.This study have shown that the frequency of the use of foreign language learning strategies by science students are generally higher than arts students.For arts students,the most commonly used strategies is meta-cognitive strategies,while the most frequently used strategies of science students are cognitive strategies andcompensation strategies.When science students just entered the school,their frequency of using compensation strategies is significantly higher than that of arts students.However,after one and a half years of college professional study,there is no difference in the frequency of the use of compensation strategies between arts students and science students.On the contrary,the use of meta-cognitive strategies by arts sophomores is significantly higher than that of science sophomores.After one and a half years of college study,the frequency of the use of various foreign language learning strategies of arts students did not increase or decrease significantly,but there was a significant sharp decrease in the frequency of the use of meta-cognitive strategies among science students.Therefore,in the process of foreign language teaching in universities,both foreign language teachers and foreign language learners should be aware of the influence of major differences on foreign language learning strategies.The teachers should adopt a variety of teaching methods to maximize the benefits of the foreign language learning strategies the students have mastered,and help them master unfamiliar foreign language learning strategies in order to make foreign language learning more efficient and comprehensive.