A Study On The Relation Between The Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Non-english Major Students And The Breadth And In-depth Of Vocabulary Acquisition

It's universally acknowledged that vocabulary is the foundation in second language learning, which at some extent plays a decisive role to estimate the level of learners of EFL. However, lion's shares of students have come across some difficulties in learning vocabulary that are regarded as the main obstacle which prevent the students from developing their abilities on listening, reading, speaking and writing. Consequently, to promote the efficacy of language learners on learning vocabulary has become a critical problem for all linguists who have been trying to find an appropriate way to settle down the Achilles heel on studying vocabulary learning as soon as possible. What we could observe without any efforts is that most of linguists believed that the best way to. teach vocabulary was to teach the learner the learning strategies. Therefore, the intention of this study is related with giving some constructive suggestion to the students about selecting effective vocabulary learning strategies as well as encouraging the teachers to give more instructions about how to learn vocabulary more efficiently by utilizing appropriate vocabulary learning strategies.The whole thesis is divided into six parts. The first chapter covers the causes of doing this investigation, the importance of role of vocabulary learning strategies in SLA, the necessities of studying vocabulary learning strategies. Since 1960s, the hub of making research on second language acquisition has already transferred from how to teach to how to learn on the side of students step by step. Under the guidance of this object, more new teaching content are added into the goals of English teaching. Besides ask for the students mastering all kinds of English techniques, emphasizing the significant role of imparting the English learning strategies to the students is equally important as well.The second chapter mainly deals with the theoretical foundation for the whole paper which has associations with the definitions and taxonomy of language learning strategies, the conception of vocabulary learning strategies and its basic concerns as well as the previous research of vocabulary learning strategies. The theoretical foundation of the dissertation is based on the framework of learning strategies originated from O'Mally and Chamot, as following, learning strategies is divided into three levels referring to metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies; metacognitive strategies is applied for evaluation, monitor, the employment of managing cognitive strategies; cognitive strategies is directly exploited into the activities of learning languages; social/affective strategies is concerned about the activities students took part in and the emotion accommodation.The third chapter is core of the whole paper referring to the methodology of the investigation including the objectives, the test instrument, data collection and data analysis. The dissertation attempts to investigate the 34 juniors majoring in architecture came from Engineering college of HuBei University of Technology. To begin with acquiring the students individually to finish the questionnaire aims to find out what kind of learning strategies the students intend to use. Following, by utilization of the measuring table of breadth and depth vocabulary learning created by Nation, the students are demanded to accomplish them independently.The fourth chapter not only analyzes the data in terms of overall pattern of vocabulary learning strategies but also illustrate the correlation between vocabulary strategies and the scores on the test of Vocabulary size and the depth of vocabulary knowledge. Firstly, by analyzing the questionnaire about using learning strategies, we could figure out the awareness of students selecting about learning strategies. Secondly, construing the test results of the vocabulary breadth and depth test, it could help us to know the significant correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and the two tests scores. Last but not the least, the conclusion obtained from the analysis is that the participants fail to exert vocabulary learning strategies as good as we expected. Meanwhile, when they are operating the vocabulary learning strategies, the apparent tendency is exposed. In others words, the strategies which serve to deepen the retention of vocabulary are not used frequently.In accordance with the results of the fourth part, the fifth part is going to probe into the correlation between the metaconigtive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies and the test scores as well as the students'tendency of choosing vocabulary learning strategies. Such as what sort of strategies are always utilized by the students more frequently, in the meantime, the strategies they selected have a great impact on the scores of their vocabulary tests.The sixth chapter is consisted of giving pedagogical suggestions and indicating the limitations of the paper. For one thing, to achieve the goal of high efficiency on retention vocabulary, the students are required to make plans about vocabulary learning as well as managing the process of vocabulary retention by employing diverse strategies. In addition, they should practice more in daily life and review what they learned before in time. For the other thing, the dissertation is intended to indicate that the teachers shouldn't leave the retention assignments to the students. In opposite, combining the teaching content with assisting the students to use various vocabulary learning strategies, the teachers is obliged to do that and make some optimum vocabulary learning strategies to achieve the goal referring to learn vocabulary efficiently.