An Empirical Study On The Correlation Between University Students’ Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Vocabulary Size

Vocabulary plays a decisive part in language learning since it is an essential and fundamental factor for mastering a language. For many Chinese EFL students, vocabulary is a dilemma. Due to the limitation of their learning strategies, Chinese university students’ English vocabulary size is generally inadequate for using this language frequently. This inadequacy is responsible for their unsatisfactory performance in exams. Therefore, the teachers should find out ways to enlarge their vocabulary size. By feat of the questionnaire and the SPSS program, this empirical study is to look over the differences in vocabulary learning strategies between high vocabulary size and low vocabulary size students’, and find out the correlation between vocabulary learning strategies use and vocabulary size. One hundred and ninety-six sophomores from Sanming University were divided into two groups based on their vocabulary level test scores and were asked to rate the frequency of their vocabulary learning strategies use on the questionnaire adapted from Schmitt’s VLS taxonomy. It is found that determination strategy was the most frequently used strategy whereas social strategy was the least frequently used by all subjects. A set of T-tests shows that the frequencies of vocabulary learning strategy use between high vocabulary size and low vocabulary size students are significantly different at the 0.01 level. Correlation analysis reveals that there exists a correlation between vocabulary level test scores and vocabulary learning strategy use. The study also finds out that the frequency of the high vocabulary size students’ vocabulary learning strategies use is significantly more than that of the low vocabulary size students’. Correlation analysis demonstrates that the use of English-English dictionary strategy contributes to vocabulary size increase of the high vocabulary size students. In view of this, teachers should train the students on how to use an English-English dictionary more appropriately rather than let them use an English-Chinese dictionary just for getting Chinese words’ meaning. The last finding is that paraphrasing new words strategy is positively related with the vocabulary test scores of the high vocabulary size students. And this strategy can also be trained among those students with low vocabulary size in order to enlarge their vocabulary size.