A Contrastive Study Of High School Learners' Beliefs And Strategies On Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary is one of the three major components that constitute English language knowledge (the other two are phonetics and grammar), and is the foundation of all English language skills, so vocabulary plays a crucial role in foreign language instruction. Just as Michael McCarthy (1990) claims that no matter how good one's grammar is and how beautiful one's pronunciation is, but if one has no adequate vocabulary to express one's own feelings or to understand others' opinions, one still cannot communicate with others in this language. Harmer (1990) also points out that "If we compare language structure as the sketch of the language, vocabulary is the thing that provides important organs as well as blood and flesh."The present research aims at providing an empirical study about various kinds of vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies possessed by senior high school learners in the Chinese context. In addition to it, the similarities and differences between subjects of different proficiency levels in their views on and practice of vocabulary learning strategies are explored as well. The relationships between vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary size are displayed at last. This paper examines 206 senior students from Yangzhou University Affiliated Middle School through one questionnaire survey, one vocabulary size test and interviews. Detailed analysis of both the qualitative and quantitative data yielded the findings as follows:1) The senior students dwell on the belief that "Words should be learned through application and acquired through context". They respond negatively not only to rote-learning belief but also to some pure mechanical memorization strategies. In practice, they tend to adopt a variety of vocabulary learning strategies including some of metacognitive strategies especially Selective Attention and Self-monitoring, most of the cognitive strategies with Guessing, Application, Association, Wide-reading, Doing-exercises, Dictionary and Context being the most favored, Passage-reciting, Grouping and Rote-learning the least favored.2) Subjects at different proficiency levels are found to be significantly different from each other in vocabulary learning strategies. Compared with senior one, senior three students are more mature in organizing and regulating their learning process. Moreover, senior three students incline to adopt a variety of vocabulary learning strategies and show higher flexibility in vocabulary learning skills and methods. Compared with senior one students who sometimes insist on mechanical-learning strategies, senior three students report using more meaning-oriented strategies, tend to use guessing and contextual encoding while reading, prefer to apply words in conversations and compositions to consolidatenewly-learned items. In addition, senior three students can well manage and take initiative in their vocabulary learning, have a willingness to put extra effort into the learning process, whereas senior one students just remain passive and lack systematic planning and self-initiation.3) There exist a certain correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary size. The belief of rote-learning is negatively correlated with vocabulary size. The four metacognitive strategies are highly positively correlated with vocabulary size. They turn out to be the strong predictors of the dependent variable. Among the cognitive strategies, Guessing, Application, Association and Wide-reading strategies are highly correlated with the dependent variable. Doing exercises, Dictionary and Context are related positively with vocabulary size. By contrast, Grouping, Passage-reciting and Rote-learning strategies are proved to be negative predictors of vocabulary size. Time is a variable that is most significantly related with the dependent variable.In terms of the findings, this paper suggests that the practice of various kinds of vocabulary learning strategies as well as a combination of these strategies be strongly advocated and widely enforced in the context of Chinese...