An Investigation Into The Use Of English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Senior High School Students

Vocabulary learning plays an important role in the process of English learning. It is obviously thatvocabulary is one of the three elements (grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary) of a language, it is thefoundation of language skills. Wilkin D. A.(1972) proposed,“Without grammar very little can be conveyed;without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”. No better how good one’s grammar is and how beautifulone’s pronunciation is, but if one has no adequate vocabulary to express one’s own feelings or tounderstand other people’s opinions, one cannot communicate with others in language. However, for most ofthe Chinese students, vocabulary learning is one of the most difficult parts for senior high school students.When faced with so many English words, and they always feel out of place. So in order to improve the highschool students’ vocabulary learning efficiency, the study on vocabulary leaning strategy is very important.This study chooses300students in Changge NO.1Middle School. The research instruments in thisstudy are questionnaires and interviews, this study aims to find the overall using situation and major factorsaffect the using of vocabulary learning strategies in this school. The author totally received293validquestionnaires. Through the detailed analysis of the questionnaires, the results are as follows: Among the293subjects,115participants think that vocabulary should be learnt by use rather than by rote learning.Besides, there are another97participants learn vocabulary through the context. The strategies ofvocabulary learning used most frequently by the293participants are guessing, note-taking, dictionaries andso on. Based on the above results and the interviews about27students, the author find out that there aremainly three factors affect students using vocabulary learning strategies. They are students themselves,teacher’s influence and classmates’ influence.This study contains five parts. The first part introduces the research background and the purpose ofthis study. The second part is about the literature review, which makes a general introduction about relatedresearch on English vocabulary learning strategies at home and abroad. The third part is research design,the author is mainly describe the research questions, research subjects, research instruments, researchprocedures and data collection. The fourth part is about the research results, the author is mainly to make some analyzation and discussion. At last, the author puts forward the major findings of the study andenlightenment on English vocabulary learning.