An Investigation Of English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Employed By The Local College Students

This research sets out to explore students'beliefs on vocabulary learning and employment of vocabulary learning strategies for local college EFL students. Four research questions are raised: (1) What attitude do the students have towards vocabulary learning? (2) What is the pattern of various vocabulary learning strategy use for local college students? (3) Which strategies are the most frequently used or the least frequently used by students? (4) Can students'differences in gender and major affect their vocabulary learning strategy use?The participants in the study include 450 local college students who came from Gannan Normal University, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, and Gannan Medical University in Ganzhou. The data for the research are mainly obtained through two instruments—the questionnaire and the interview. The collected data are analyzed with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS11.5).The findings are revealed from the present research. Firstly, most local college students share the belief that vocabulary should be learned through use. Secondly, metacognitive strategies, which provide a way for learners to coordinate their own learning process, are adopted in a narrow range. Cognitive strategies, requiring working on the new words, are mostly employed by local college students. Unfortunately, consolidation and activation, requiring reviewing and practicing the newly-learned words, are underestimated. Social strategies, which demand communication in the target language, are not used generally. Affective strategies, involving efforts to control one's feeling, are more frequently used by the local college students in this sampling. Thirdly, according to the descriptive analysis, the study indicates that the most frequently used strategy is cognitive strategies, followed by metacognitive strategies (the Mean is above 3), and the least one is social/affective strategies. Specifically, dictionary strategies and contextual guessing are the most frequently used strategies, while social strategies is the least used among all VLSs. Lastly, there are significant differences for different majors and genders in many vocabulary learning strategies, especially at cognitive level. Namely, female students tend to use more conscious strategies than male students; students of humanities use vocabulary learning strategies more often than those of science; freshmen of English major adopt VLSs more frequently than non-English major freshmen.These results provide implications for both the teachers and the students. The teachers should instruct students in vocabulary learning, and pay attention to students'individual differences and particular problems. Moreover, they should give more weight to the importance of learning strategies used in English teaching and learning, and introduce language learning strategies to their students in daily study to solve their difficulties, especially in vocabulary leaning. The students should use the vocabulary learning strategies consciously and initiatively so as to lead them away from dependency on their age-old preference for rote learning to learning in flexible and various ways.