A Cross-sectional Study Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies By Chinese Non-English Major Students In 4 Grades

Vocabulary learning strategy is a hot issue in the study of SLA, into which a lot of researches have been made abroad and in China. The researches abroad center around the classification of the vocabulary learning strategies or the description of strategy or strategies of particular group of learners and some researches go to the theoretical framework for evaluation and training. The last decade has witnessed the development in breadth and depth in the research of this domain in China. These studies provide the insight into the general characteristic of the strategy usage of the Chinese students- which have greatly enriched the understanding of the vocabulary-learning process of the Chinese students. However, the weakness of their studies is that these researches didn't take more variables such as the different level of the proficiency into account, and didn't gave an exact description of the difference between different groups of students at different learning stages. There is no study of the change in the use of vocabulary learning strategies in the course of 4 years study of undergraduate students. It is important to get the knowledge of the varying pattern in the 4-year-study, which is helpful to improve the efficiency of the College English vocabulary teaching .In the cross-sectional approach, the present study investigates the respective vocabulary learning strategies of non-English major students ranging from Grade 2001 to 1998. The varying pattern is determined of the employment of vocabulary learning strategies by the Chinese non-English major students in the course of 4 years. The weakness of employment of vocabulary learning strategies is by the students is located. Quantitative method is employed throughout the study and SPSS software is used in statistic analysis of data.The investigation shows that: (1) Non-English major students' use of vocabulary learning strategies during their tour college years is a process of dynamic changes: the first year is the initial stage, in which the overall frequency of using strategies is relatively low and there is a quite big difference among students: the second year is a stage of "taking shape", while the third year is a stage of consolidation. In the second and third years, students use strategies in a frequent and stable way. and there is not a big difference between them. The fourth year is a stage of differentiation. The difference in the use of learning strategies is intensified by the lack of common learning objects. (2) Generally speaking, the learning strategies used by the students fail to process the information of the word deeply, which negatively influences their learning efficiency. (3) The differences in using strategies between successful learners and less successful learners do exist, but are not remarkable. The former use more of the strategies that process the information of the word deeply, such as "productive mastery", "reading", "association", "word formation" and "word exercise". (4) Inner links exist between some learning strategies, for example, "word guessing" and "dictionary consulting", which deserves further study. (5) There doesn't exist any strong correlation between the vocabulary learning strategies and the learning achievement. The condition for facilitative use of learning strategies should be further explored.On the basis of the result of the investigation, a training program of vocabulary learning strategies has been designed.