A Study on Relationship between Gender, Learning Strategies and Achievement among Iranian EFL learners

Abstract

Achievement in foreign language learning depends on a great number of factors such as gender, learning strategies, learners’ attitudes towards the target language, anxiety, school type and the like to name a few. Hence, this study intended to investigate the strategies used by EFL learners with the purpose of finding the degree and the domain of differences of the strategies used by different genders and disclosing the extent to which strategy use and achievement are interrelated. To this end, a related questionnaire as well as an S-test, were distributed among 445 first grader - senior high school learners from 17 high schools in Mashhad. The findings of the study indicated a significant difference between male and female students regarding using the learning strategies in the first place. As it showed, the learning strategies of Memory, Cognitive and Metacognitive are more frequently used by the females while social and affective strategies are more in males’ favor. Secondly, it was proved that female students are more successful than male students in foreign language learning. Consequently, being aware of this differences between strategies based on different genders will help both teachers and students to achieve more success in learning a foreign language. Therefore, teachers, according to the research findings, are recommended to use for their pupils the learning strategies they will need for better achievement.

Keywords: Learning strategies, S-test, EFL learners.