An Investigation Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Employed By Non-english Majors

Vocabulary is the basic skill of language learning, including listening, speaking,reading and writing. Research shows that, without vocabulary, one cannot acquire alanguage successfully. In the process of learning vocabulary, vocabulary learningstrategies play a significant role, because the acquisition of vocabulary is anever-ending process and often poses insurmountable difficulties for languagelearners. Therefore, the study of vocabulary learning strategies is required as animportant step in second language acquisition. But unfortunately, only few researchersfocus on vocabulary learning strategy used by Chinese students. So the research intovocabulary learning strategy is absolutely needed and has significant practical value.The major purpose of the present research was to explore the vocabulary learningstrategies employed by Chinese non-English-major students in a university. A total of100sophomores from Jiujiang University participated in this study. A questionnaireadapted from Gu and Johnson’s (1996)90-item Inventory for Vocabulary LearningStrategy and a vocabulary size test selected from the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation1990) were used to collect data for this study. With the help of SPSS13.0, descriptiveanalysis, correlation analysis and independent samples t-tests were conducted andused to analyze the data gained in the study. In addition, a semi-structured interviewwas conducted among eight learners to gather qualitative data to support thequantitative results.Several findings were revealed from the present study: First, the participantspredominately held the belief that “vocabulary should be studied and put to use”. Intheir vocabulary learning processes, the great majority of the participants adopted avariety of cognitive and meta-cognitive vocabulary learning strategies, but theyadopted a lower use of social/affective strategies. Secondly, the correlation analysisrevealed that the belief “the words should be memorized” was negatively correlatedwith students’ vocabulary learning achievements, while the other two were positivelyand significantly correlated. All the three meta-cognitive strategies and the majority ofcognitive strategies had significantly positive correlation with students’ vocabularyproficiency. Thirdly, the successful learners outperformed the less successful learnersin the three main vocabulary learning strategies and all their sub-strategies, suggestingthat the successful learners adopted a wider range of vocabulary learning strategiesand used them at a higher frequency than the less successful learners did. Finally, male and female students were significantly different in all the three vocabularylearning beliefs. In general, females, more often than not, tended to use greaternumbers of strategies and use strategies more frequently than males for vocabularylearning.On the basis of the findings above, some pedagogical implications were putforward for vocabulary teaching and learning. First of all, teachers should providestudents with more space and time and lead them to form positive vocabulary learningstyle. Meanwhile, teachers should help their students recognize the importance ofvocabulary learning and solve the difficulties encountered in their learning process.For different students, teachers should take different teaching methods, developunique and effective teaching programs to enrich the cultural atmosphere andeffectively improve the vocabulary learning teaching.