A Contrastive Study On Vocabulary Learning Strategies Adopted By Students Of Humanities And Sciences

Vocabulary is playing an important role in the foreign language teaching and learning, however, the status in the language acquisition has been changing from time to time. Nowadays, vocabulary is no longer sidelined in the research of the second language learning and in language teaching. With this shift in emphasis, teachers are faced with the challenge of how to help their students learn the words in the target language efficiently. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to impart their students some useful vocabulary learning strategies in the course of teaching.The paper attempts to explore the overall pattern of English vocabulary learning strategies adopted by non-English major students from humanities and sciences. In addition to it, the employment of specific memorization strategies, and both similarities and differences in English vocabulary strategies use between the students of humanities and the students of sciences are explored as well. A questionnaire, adapted from Gu and Johnson (1996), is administered to 325 college students from three universities.Students' vocabulary learning strategies are investigated at metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective levels. By using SPSS, the analyses of the data reveal: (1) The investigated students tend to view vocabulary learning as a kind of monotonous, mechanical task from which they derive little pleasure or sense of success. Generally speaking, they employ a variety of vocabulary strategies at cognitive, metacognitive and social/affective levels; (2) Oral plus visual repetition, dictionary use and oral repetition predominate all memorization strategies. Other commonly used memorization strategies include semantic association, contextualization, word formation, and grouping. (3) The students of humanities and the students of sciences use some similar vocabulary learning strategies. However, there exist indeed some significant differences in using some cognitive vocabulary learning strategies in their vocabulary learning.Finally, the pedagogical implications of the research are suggested.