An Investigation Into English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Students In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary is the basic element of a language and very important tolanguage learners. As Wilkins says in Language and Language Teaching,“We can’t accept that grammar is more important than vocabulary.Without grammar, very little can be conveyed; without vocabulary,nothing can be conveyed.” However, the teaching and learning ofvocabulary have been undervalued in the field of second languageacquisition. Vocabulary learning is time-consuming and of low efficiencyfor most second language learners. The newly-issued Senior SchoolEnglish Curriculum Standards (2003) has raised greater demand forvocabulary: the senior students are required to master3,300-4,500wordsbesides a lot of useful expressions. Considering that millions of highschool students in China are eager to achieve this goal and enlarge theirvocabulary size，it is necessary to make researches on vocabularylearning strategies.The author investigated the current situation of vocabulary learningstrategies in Inner Mongolia Genhe No.2Middle School. The instrumentsare one questionnaire which is designed based on the framework ofO’Malley and Chamot and two vocabulary test papers. The study tries toanswer the following questions:1. What are the subjects’ beliefs on vocabulary learning?2. What is the subjects’ whole pattern of vocabulary learningstrategies?3. Are the vocabulary learning strategies used by male subjectsdifferent from those used by female subjects?Several findings are revealed from the present study.Firstly, most senior high school students believe that words should be learnt in use and context.Secondly，students employ all kinds of strategies to learn Englishvocabulary，but most use them at medium level. The more frequentlyused strategies are note-taking, guessing, imitating and repetitionstrategies: and the least used strategies are grouping strategies.Thirdly，male and female students differ greatly in the use ofvocabulary learning strategies.