A Study Of Non-English Majors' Metacognitive Learning Strategies And Lexical Acquisition

The present study explores the relationship between the use of metacognitive learning strategies by EFL learners and their vocabulary acquisition; and the effect of the use of the metacognitive learning strategies on Chinese non-English majors' lexical acquisition. To achieve this purpose, a survey was conducted on the use of metacognitive learning strategies together with a vocabulary-size test among 30 Chinese non-English first-year students who were chosen out at random from 1000 students in Jiangxi University of Science and Technology.The concept and classification of metacognitive strategies adopted in this research were proposed by O'Malley & Chamot's in 1990, in which metacognitive strategies were regarded as a kind of executive strategies used consciously by the beginning and intermediate ESL students in a higher level than the other two kinds of strategies (cognitive strategies and affective strategies). Within this theoretical framework, this research studies six aspects of learners' metacognitive strategies in vocabulary learning. They are advance organizers, selective attention, self-management, advance preparation, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation.The data from the empirical study were analyzed by SPSS13.0 and they revealed that Chinese non-English students do employ some metacognitive strategies in their vocabulary learning process and the use of these strategies correlate with their vocabulary test achievements, and that metacognitive strategies may positively influence their lexical acquisition, that is, the more metacognitive strategies they use, the more efficient their lexical acquisition is. This suggests that there is great need for further metacognitive learning strategy training to enhance learners' awareness of metacognitive strategy and to encourage them to use those strategies in an authentic learning task, among which the self-monitoring strategy should be more encouraged because it can make the learners become more efficient and autonomic in the language vocabulary learning. The results of the present study also indicate that systematical introduction and reinforcement of metacognitive learning strategies can help students learn the target language vocabularies more effectively and thus improve their language learning as a whole.