Guessing Strategy Of Vocabulary Learning-A Cognitive Perspective

"For many years vocabulary was the poor relation of language teaching. Its neglect has been in part due to a specialization in linguistic research on syntax and phonology which may have fostered a climate in which vocabulary was felt to be a less important element in learning a second language"(Carter, 1998: 184). But nowadays, vocabulary learning is becoming the focus of linguistic research, for linguists have shifted their focus from grammar to vocabulary. And in the field of language education, more and more people who study language acquisition, especially the L2 acquisition, have noticed that vocabulary learning is the basic and indispensable step in foreign language learning. On the other hand,"learners feel that many of their difficulties in both receptive and productive language use result from an inadequate vocabulary"(Nation, 1990: 2). The goal of this thesis is to reveal the process of how human beings cognize and gain the knowledge of the world, to understand the route of language acquisition, to discuss the cognitive psychological problems of vocabulary learning strategies, to prove the importance of the guessing strategy, and to find out how to apply the guessing strategies to vocabulary learning. Through the cognition of the world, people can find out the route of the cognition of language. Through the route, people can know how to learn language. And, from this perspective, linguists developed the study of the language learning strategies. In light of the important position of vocabulary, the learning strategies of vocabulary are becoming the focus, too. There are many linguists who have discussed the vocabulary learning strategies in their research and mentioned that guessing is a useful strategy. But there is not enough research on the aspect of theory of the vocabulary guessing strategy. That is why the hypothesis-testing theory on the cognitive psychology is discussed in this thesis, for it reveals the process of human beings'learning. It provides an important evidence for the guessing strategies.Based on the Hypothesis-Testing theory and some other relevant theories of cognitive psychology, guessing strategy could be considered as an important learning strategy for the vocabulary learning. The learners adopt the guessing strategy in their foreign language learning unconsciously, so what the educator should do is help learners to be conscious with guessing, and to teach them how to make the right guessing, then to get a better result in vocabulary learning.