Abstract

This article reports a large-scale survey on the use of language learning strategies by first-year college students in Taiwan, with the aim of describing what language learning strategies they reported using and what strategic patterns were formed. A total of 199 non-English majors responded to a survey designed by Oxford (1990), namely, the Strategies Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Version 7.0). The results show that today’s language learners self-reported using the following SILL strategies in the following order of frequency: compensation strategies, metacognitive strategies, social strategies, memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and affective strategies. In addition, the results also demonstrate that three SILL categories used today were used differently in the past: affective strategies, metacognitive strategies, and compensation strategies. Moreover, it was also found that males and females these days had slightly different strategic patterns from one another in learning English and also used slightly different ones in the past.

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