Profiles of the Pre-Adolescent Learner of Chinese as a Foreign Language in a Spanish-Speaking Context

The objective is to know how a group of pre-adolescents at the Confucius Institute of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (IC-ULPGC) learn Chinese as a foreign language (ChLE). In order to improve this process, we investigated the learning strategies (EAL) to improve their knowledge of ChLE. The case of 81 12-year-old students, who voluntarily attended between 2019-2020 at the IC-ULPGC, is analyzed. Based on the theoretical framework, an investigation is designed in which we ask ourselves the possible relationship between their personal and academic factors (L1, gender, monolingual/bilingual school and final exam score) and the EALs used. These data were collected through a survey, which included the Strategy-Inventory-for-Language-Learning. Statistical analysis of the results shows that: the subjects do not present a high frequency of EAL use; the most used strategy is the social one, and the least, the cognitive one, although the affective and metacognitive ones have a significant correlation with academic success; no correlation has been established between personal variables, L1, sex or type of school, with the test results; but there is a correlation between the variety of education (monolingual/bilingual) and the use of EALs.