A Study On English Vocabulary Learning Strategies

This dissertation made an investigation into the overall pattern of vocabulary learning strategy used by some high school students. In addition, the author compared the vocabulary learning strategies used by high proficient students (HPS) and low proficient students (LPS), and explored the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and outcomes in learning English by means of questionnaire survey and vocabulary knowledge test.A questionnaire was administered to 365 middle school students from grade three in jiangxi province. Students' vocabulary learning strategies were investigated at metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective levels. The major findings can be stated as follows: 1) Generally speaking, middle school students just sometimes employed vocabulary strategies at cognitive, metacognitive and social/affective levels; Among the three vocabulary learning strategies, cognitive strategies were the most frequently used ones, followed by metacognitive strategies and then social/affective strategies. The most frequently employed English vocabulary learning strategies were ranked as guessing, repetition, imagery, and selective attention. 2) The high proficient students (HPS) used more strategies than the low proficient students (LPS); HPS used these strategies much more frequently than LPS. HPS did better in the use of metacognitive strategies. Contextualization, guessing and dictionary strategies were more frequently used by HPS. In contrast to the above differences, the two groups of students were strikingly similar in using guessing, repetition strategies 3) Most vocabulary learning strategies proved to be positively correlated with the learners' vocabulary size. The metacognitive strategies were positively and very significantly or highly correlated with V-test scores. Dictionary, guessing, contextualization were significant at the 0.01 confident level and Interest.These findings indicate that effective vocabulary learning strategies will facilitate vocabulary learning and are helpful to autonomous vocabulary development. This requests the teachers to provide strategies-based instruction to students as a part of the foreign language curriculum. They should modify their future vocabulary teaching to...