A Study On Senior High School Students' English Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Since 1970s, the focus of the researches on the second language acquisition is now experiencing a shift from the teachers'mere knowledge delivery to helping the learners how to learn. The National English Curriculum Standard particularly emphasizes the teaching of learning strategies. English teachers have started to concern about helping the learners to develop not only English skills but also English learning strategies. English vocabulary is widely considered as an important component of second language proficiency. The National English Curriculum Standard has set higher requirement for high school students especially on vocabulary. In actual teaching, the major problem with English study lies in vocabulary learning. Therefore, it is worthwhile exploring vocabulary learning strategies used by Chinese high school students. The aims of research are to find out: 1) the overall patterns of vocabulary strategies employed by high school students. 2) the correlation between the vocabulary learning strategies and the learners'English scores.This project has made an investigation on 436 students of Senior Two from the three schools of different levels in Nanjing. The result of the questionnaire is collected and analyzed. The major findings are concluded as follows: 1) The students of Senior Two have a generally low level of using English vocabulary learning strategies, especially the meta-cognitive strategy, the cognitive strategy and the memory strategy. 2) There exists a correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and English scores. High-strategy learners obviously have better English scores than low-strategy learners. Implications of these and other findings are discussed and suggestions are made regarding the vocabulary strategy in senior high school.