The Application Of Second Language Vocabulary Learning Strategies For Middle School Students In Luoyang

It is now widely acknowledged that vocabulary is the basis of acquiring a foreignlanguage. Just as Linguist D. A. Wilkins, in his Linguistics in Language Teaching (1978)wrote,“Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can beconveyed.” Many researches and learners agree that second language vocabulary acquisitionis an essential segment of second language acquisition. No matter how well the students learnthe grammar, no matter how successfully the sounds of the second language (SL) aremastered, without enough vocabulary one can not express a wide range of meanings.Communication in SL just can not happen in any meaningful way.The vocabulary acquisition has been a difficult problem among Chinese junior highschool students for long time. In order to better understand the overall pattern of vocabularylearning strategies used by the junior high school students, the author designed the students’vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire, the design of the questionnaire is based on O‘Malley&Chamot’s vocabulary learning strategies classification method, at the same time onthe basis of reference Tang ZhenYu’s junior middle school students vocabulary learningstrategies questionnaire.The present study deals with the following questions:1) Is there any difference in the use of English vocabulary learning strategies betweenstudents of Hongzhi class and students of regular class?2) Is there any relationship between students’ vocabulary learning strategy use and theirlearning achievement?3) What’s the effect of vocabulary strategy training on vocabulary test score?Through reviewing the foreign and Chinese studies on vocabulary learning strategy, the paper chose86junior middle school students in Grade Two from two different classes(Hongzhi class and a regular class) in Luoyang experimental school as the study subjects. Theinstrument adopted is a student questionnaire of vocabulary learning strategies, which isdesigned by means of five-point scale, a vocabulary test and an interview to conduct anexperimental study. Through the data collection and analysis, the author finds that:1) theapplication of vocabulary learning strategies by junior middle school students was still in theinitial stage, where the overall frequency of using strategies is relatively low.2) Students’English vocabulary learning strategy use and their learning achievement are close related. Theapplication of English vocabulary learning strategies to the teaching and learning seemseffective for the students in Junior Middle school.3) After the vocabulary strategy training,the author found that the students who are trained know the significance of Englishvocabulary learning strategies; they can use more strategies in their English vocabularylearning to help them to memory the new English words. The effect is more obvious thanthose students who didn’t trained.The whole thesis is composed of six parts: Part one is a brief introduction. It presents thesignificance of the vocabulary and the vocabulary learning strategy, the purpose of theresearch and the structure of the thesis. Part two is relevant literature review. It shows therelated experimental researchers in the literature of vocabulary learning strategies conductedby scholars abroad and home. Chapter three is the research design. It states the researchsubjects, the instrument, and the research process, it mainly takes questionnaire. Chapter fouris main body of the study. It shows and analyzes the study results. Chapter five is implications.Chapter six is the conclusion.