Critique

Chinese EFL Students’ Learning Strategies for Oral Communication

This summary talks about an investigation made by a teacher named Huang Xiao-Hua to know which were the learning strategies for oral communication employed by Chinese EFL student’s, and that helped them to enhance their communicative skills. For this study, 60 students from the Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute were asked to answer a 22 items test in which they had to describe their personal learning strategies. In addition, the students with the ten highest and nine lowest scores were chosen to be personally interviewed with the purpose of gathering detailed information. Talking to oneself, memorizing lists of vocabulary, thinking in English, speaking in English with other students, teachers or native speakers, reading, and participating in communicative activities were some of the findings revealed in this investigation, and which are most commonly used by the learners. At the same time, motivation and the students’ learning behavior were mentioned as important factors that influenced their learning processes. Finally, the author concluded that “good language learners in China are in many respects similar to good language learners elsewhere.”

In what concerns to the way the summary is written, the title needs to be more specific because when you finish reading the whole summary you notice that it talks about the findings of the investigation, and not about what you read in the title which was to know more about the learning strategies of the students. Also, the introduction includes some elements, such as assessment and techniques that go beyond the title because it does not mentioned anything about them. However, I know the report has to be short, but I think it does not include enough information. Besides, the sample of 60 students mentioned in the methodology is not a representative number of all the people who study in the Guangzhou Foreign Language Institute, so a bigger sample should have been considered. Finally, the author goes on to say that “good language learners in China are in many respects similar to good language learners elsewhere.” In this statement, he is generalizing by saying that what happens in this institute is happening everywhere. Therefore, he is not taking into account that there are many other factors that should be considered and that make people different from one another.