| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東商業技術學院 === 應用英語系(所) === 101 === Past literature has indicated learning strategy enhances learners’ language acquisition and learning autonomy and helps conquer learning difficulty. Although over the past decades, considerable research has been devoted to strategy use underlying one of the four language skills or language learning in general, less effort has been found on specific strategies particularly geared to the occasions of English oral communication. Not to mention, sex factor has hardly been probed and qualitatively oriented interviews have seldom been conducted in such strategy research. The present study attempted to explore adult learners’ perceptions, difficulties, and strategy preferences of orally communicating in English. These communication strategies were sorted into three types: metacognitive, cognitive, and socioaffective. Independent-samples t-tests were implemented to examine the gender effects underlying this strategy use framework. Two hundred and thirty-seven college students (M = 89, F = 148) were asked to fill out a 64-item questionnaire concerning oral communication. Twenty-eight (M = 16, F = 12) of them volunteered for the post-survey interviews. The qualitative data drawn from these individual interviews were meant to compare with or supplement the results obtained from the questionnaires. The important findings of the current study were summarized as follows: (a) negative psychological reactions (i.e., anxiety and fear) played a crucial role in the process of English oral communication; (b) the college students not only easily got nervous while communicating in English but intentionally avoided any English speaking occasions for fear of making mistakes; they were passive speakers and not enthusiastic about English communication activities; (c) insufficient vocabulary knowledge, lack of background information involved in the talks, and having problems expressing what was intended to say were common difficulties for these adults while conversing with others in English; (d) no significant differences were detected between male and female learners in oral communication difficulties; (e) the interview results further indicated inadequacies in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation were basically responsible for the oral communication difficulties for both male and female learners; (f) college students were moderate strategy users of oral communication (M = 3.17); metacognitive strategies were found used most, and cognitive strategies least; (g) as for the individual strategy items, the strategies of guessing, message reduction and alteration, and asking for clarification were used most often, and finding chances to speak with native English speakers or even Mandarin-speaking English teachers was used least often; (h) females significantly used more strategies than males in terms of overall and all types of strategies except for the socioaffective category; (i) the greatest gender differences in the individual strategy items were detected in repeating what the interlocutors said, attending to key words, and taking notes with the strategy superiority found in the female learners; (j) in the interviews, 50% of the interviewees ranked their oral communication performance as poor, 43% as fair, and 7% as good, while 68% reported they rarely had the chance to communicate with others in English. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research were provided to conclude this study.
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