An Empirical Study Of English Vocabulary Learning

D.A. Wilkins, the famous British linguist, ever asserted"Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed."Vocabulary study is of critical importance to English teaching and it impenetrates the whole process of English learning. Nevertheless, the status of English vocabulary learning and teaching, home and abroad, experiences a period from a long history of ignorance to up-lift. The status of our English vocabulary teaching and learning still stagnates on the level of low efficiency, because teachers just teach words in an isolated way, and learners only attach importance to vocabulary lists.As for the vocabulary learning methods, Nation(1990) classified them,in a broad sense, into two― Direct Vocabulary Learning and Indirect Vocabulary Learning. Direct Vocabulary Learning refers to the strategies that directly involve the target language in the sense that they require mental processing of the language. However, Indirect Vocabulary Learning means that learners concentrate their energy on some other aspects, especially the message which language transmits. The learners do not need to learn vocabulary specially.-The research of second language vocabulary acquisition is still a very weak subfield of second language acquisition in China. Very few researches have been carried on to explore the relationship between Direct Vocabulary Learning and Indirect Vocabulary Learning. The investigations about the efficiency of both the two vocabulary learning methods have rarely been initiated. It is obvious that the work in this field is of great, special and practical value.