Metacognitive Strategies And English Lexical Competence

Vocabulary plays an important role in language acquisition. Since the early 1980s, lexical acquisition has gradually become one of the most explored areas in applied linguistics. This growing trend culminated in the proposition that L2 lexical acquisition assumes the central role in L2 acquisition.Against this research background, various models of L2 lexical competence development have been established. These theoretical studies in turn have exerted a profound influence on China's college English education. Usually the first and foremost question confronting every researcher is, "What exactly does 'knowing a word' mean?" Different definitions have been put forward to provide researchers with an operationable basis for their studies. Studies in this connection are reviewed and grouped in this thesis. In general, these studies exhibit a move from the word-centered micro approach to the learner-centered macro approach.In view of the disagreement between the established models of L2 lexical competence development and research findings of some empirical studies conducted by domestic scholars, this thesis is intended to apply the notion of metacognitive strategies and its training to China's formal L2 lexical instruction at colleges. As an inherent requirement of learner-centered education, theoretically speaking, there is supposed to exist a high correlation coefficient between the application of metacognitive strategies and the learner's overall L2 lexical competence.To verify and prove this hypothesis, an empirical study involving two samples of research subjects is conducted. All these subjects are first-year college students from two intact classes of Hangzhou Dianzi University and Qianjiang College respectively. The research results are relatively satisfactory.In light of the research results, suggestions for metacognitive strategy training in the classroom setting are made. In addition, to contribute to a new model of L2 lexical competence development which has more explanatory power this thesis has also made a tentative attempt to build up such a model based on the learner's metacognitive strategy development.However, as a pilot study limited by the author's personal knowledge and the objective conditions concerning the empirical study, this thesis is bound to leave much room for further verification. Hopefully, endeavors in this direction are on the right track and more researchers will work to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.