A Study On Vocabulary Learning Of High School Students

Vocabulary is the foundation of the English language study. For many learners in China, English learning begins with vocabulary. It is argued that learning English vocabulary makes great contribution to the development of grammar, listening, speaking, reading and writing, and to the enrichment of English culture knowledge. Obviously, it plays a really important role in the English study. However, some problems need to be solved for both the teachers and the students in the process of teaching and learning vocabulary. So far, although the importance of vocabulary has been realized enough, yet some other problems arise. On one hand, the problem is how the students can learn vocabulary more effectively, that is, the problem of vocabulary learning strategies. On the other hand, people spend too much time in expanding vocabulary size. In other words, they just lay emphasis on the breadth of vocabulary knowledge (quantity), but they always ignore the in-depth of vocabulary knowledge (quality), that is, there is a question that how much the students know about a word. Therefore, the following three questions will be answered in the study.1. What vocabulary learning strategies are employed by the students?2. To what extent vocabulary knowledge is acquired?3. What is the relationship between the vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary level?From the survey in the study, the author finds out three points about vocabulary learning in high schools. Firstly, in the vocabulary learning strategies survey, although the students use a variety of learning strategies, the repetition strategies have been used mostly, that is to say, they know of some vocabulary strategies, but they cannot use the other strategies properly. As a result, the students don't conduct well in building up vocabulary size, that is, the breadth of word knowledge. In the vocabulary knowledge test, it can be seen that the mean vocabulary amount which the students can recall is less than 40 percent of the words and phrases listed in the National English Curriculum Standard. This indicates the students need to be trained for using proper vocabulary learning strategies more efficiently so that they can expand their vocabulary size. Secondly, the students perform poorly in the field of the in-depth of vocabulary knowledge, including deep meanings or multi-meaning, the register of the word, morphological properties, syntactic properties and practical use. It shows that the students know a little about vocabulary knowledge. Thirdly, the author also explores the relationship between the vocabulary learning strategies and acquiring vocabulary knowledge, finding that how well the students learn vocabulary knowledge relates to the vocabulary learning strategies they employ. It indicates that vocabulary learning strategies have a great effect on mastering vocabulary knowledge.Further more, the study gives suggestions on how the teachers can do and how the students can learn vocabulary more efficiently.