Strategies in Language Learning: A Survey Among Undergraduate Japanese Language Students in USIM

It is crucially important to know what strategies are used by language learners in learning the targeted language, so that teachers will have better insights to prepare classes that equally suit learners’ behaviour. This is a pilot study aiming to identify what are the most and less frequent learning strategies used by Japanese language learners at Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM). A set of questionnaires adapted from the Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) has been distributed to 259 USIM Japanese learners at the end of semester academic year of 2021/2022. 54 students volunteered to participate and answer the questionnaire. The average frequency for each category in SILL has been identified. As for the results, Japanese language learners at USIM are moderate users of metacognitive categories as the average frequency is at the highest. In contrast, strategies from affective categories have the lowest frequency of usage. It is a hope, that in the future, learners are introduced with a set of learning strategies before or during the classes in order to help them find the best way of acquiring the target language.