The Effect Of Strategy Training On Lexical Development

Vocabulary is the building block of language. Successful second language acquisition hinges very much on vocabulary acquisition. The only real issue is the best manner in which to acquire them.This thesis aims at improving effectiveness and efficiency of vocabulary instruction in Chinese college English classes.Considering that the task of vocabulary learning is actually a substantial and endless one and given that repetition, attention, practice and revision are all necessary for successful vocabulary learning, an inevitable conclusion has to be that learners need to take on a considerable measure of responsibility for their own vocabulary development. In other words, learner autonomy is of crucial importance to university students for their vocabulary improvement.However, the common practice of vocabulary instruction in Chinese College English classes is still teacher-directed transmission model in which the role of the teacher has traditionally been to instruct, transmit, regulate, and assess, and that of the learner has been to receive and absorb. This model of vocabulary instruction emphasizes the teaching of individual vocabulary items, instead of the skills to acquire vocabulary intelligently on students'own, and it actually discourages learner autonomy.Now that we have found out the limitations inherent with teacher-directed transmission model of vocabulary instruction, then the question arises of how we can improve it; how we can encourage learner autonomy. The view taken is that the most efficient way for learner autonomy to be heightened is by having teachers provide strategy training to students as a part of foreign language teaching. Based on this, the author proposed a teaching experiment to find out whether strategy instruction facilitates lexical development for Chinese university-level students.Two classes of non-English majors from Shanghai Dianji University were selected for this teaching experiment and one was randomly assigned as experimental class and the other as control class. The control class stuck to the traditional lexical teaching (morphological forms, pronunciations, semantic meanings, syntactic structures. etc.) through the whole experiment while the experimental class received strategy instruction (with a particular focus on vocabulary strategies) from the second day of the course.Vocabulary pre-test indicated that before the teaching experiment the control class and the experimental class were homogenous in terms of lexical knowledge of the new vocabulary items to be learned. When the 10-week teaching experiment came to an end, vocabulary post-test was administered to measure treatment effects. Results collected were then processed with SPSS. The results showed that 1) both classes made natural progress; but experimental class improved greater than the control class did and 2) students in the experimental class outperformed students in the control class students, and the differences were statistically significant. Thus, it can be inferred that learning strategies have facilitating function in language learners'vocabulary development and vocabulary strategy training can be effectively incorporated into real classroom settings for Chinese university-level students.Finally, conclusions are drawn and tentative implications for future vocabulary instruction are provided on the basis of the findings of the present teaching experiment in order that vocabulary instruction at university-level will become more efficient and more effective.