An Investigation Of College Freshmen's Vocabulary Learning Beliefs And Strategies

With the emergence of autonomous learning, the study of learning strategy which is regarded as an important studying factor for individual learners has been increasingly valued by the educationists. Vocabulary learning strategies as a subclass of language learning strategies also have drawn much attention in recent years. Among all the factors that may affect vocabulary learning outcomes, vocabulary learning strategy is the most important one. And belief about vocabulary learning is one of the main factors that can affect learners' choice and employment of learning strategies. Many researchers abroad and at home performed related researches on different subjects, but few of them took college freshmen, especially freshmen faced with the challenge of becoming an autonomous learner, as subjects. Under the teaching reform which promotes autonomous learning, these freshmen are often confused and worried when confronted with so many new words in college English. Therefore, with a better understanding of their existing problems we can then find ways to assist them form proper vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies in their vocabulary learning and future English autonomous learning.The present study aims at exploring college freshmen's beliefs and strategies of English vocabulary learning. It also tries to find out which strategies are correlated with the college freshmen's vocabulary test scores. Participants are 110 freshmen of Grade 2008 from Shandong Institute of Light Industry. The instruments include a questionnaire, which is adapted from that of Gu and Johnson (1996), and a vocabulary recall test paper designed by the author. With the help of the statistical software SPSS 11.0 for windows, the analyses of the data indicate that:(1) The freshmen investigated in this study score the highest on practice belief and lowest on acquisition belief. (2) The freshmen do use some strategies in their vocabulary learning processes, though the frequency of use is not high. Among the strategies at metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective dimensions, only cognitive strategies are comparatively frequently used. The other two broad categories of VLS are not commonly used. Among the subcategories of cognitive strategies, the most commonly used ones are rote memorization, dictionary use, guessing from context, while the least used ones are visual and auditory encoding strategies, contextual encoding strategies, and grouping strategies. (3) All the subcategories of social/affective and metacognitive strategies are significantly related to the students' vocabulary test scores. Among cognitive strategies, contextual encoding strategies have most significant correlation with the freshmen's scores in the test. The other ones are word-formation, grouping, guessing from context. The following subcategories are not significantly correlated with vocabulary test scores:visual and oral repetition, use of word list. The factors that possibly influence the choice of strategies and the build-up of beliefs have been analyzed.The significance of the study is that it has presented a comprehensive picture of English vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies used by college freshmen in an autonomous learning environment, and that it has revealed some strategies which can facilitate vocabulary learning. It can also provide some implications for English learning and teaching practice. Teachers should pay more attention to strategy training and help the freshmen form proper vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies in English learning. Then the freshmen will smoothly adjust themselves to the college English vocabulary learning and become autonomous learners in their future study.The thesis also has its limitations. The sample is not big enough; only 110 students from one college participated in the research. As a consequence, the objectiveness may be compromised. In addition, some strategies are not discussed elaborately due to the length of the paper.