A Study On Developing Secondary Vocational School Students’ English Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Vocabulary is one of the most important parts in English teaching as well as a focus area for English education researchers. The New Curriculum Standards require that teachers should instruct students about vocabulary learning strategies, and help students use these strategies in learning English and improve their proficiency. Currently teachers in secondary vocational schools don’t pay much attention to vocabulary learning strategies and their ways of instructing vocabulary are quite old-fashioned. Moreover, the first-year students in vocational school are weak in self-study, and it’s difficult for them to memorize and apply words correctly.With the guidance of relevant theories, the author tries to explore the effective mode to develop first year students’ vocabulary learning strategies and help students complete their English study in this phase. In order to ensure the effectiveness and pertinence of this study, at first we do a survey about first-year students’ vocabulary learning concepts and use of strategies, and then draft a training plan with meta-cognitive strategies as the lead, cognitive strategies and social or affective strategies as the assistance according to the result of the survey.From September,2015 to January,2016,63 students majoring in Accounting from two classes in a secondary vocational school where the author works have taken part in the experiment. I take one of them as the experimental group (33 students), the other class(30 students) as the control group. By means of questionnaires, test papers and other instruments, we collect and analyze the data using SPSS 16.0. We run the experiment through pre-test, strategy training, and posttest in the period of 16 weeks. Questions answered in the study:(1) What strategies do the first-year vocational school students use to study English new words? What are their vocabulary learning concepts?(2) How do we develop students’ vocabulary learning strategies through training among the first year students in the secondary vocational school?(3) Can the vocabulary learning strategy training improve students’ vocabulary scores, their awareness of using strategies when learning words and enhance their English proficiency?Collecting and analyzing the data from the experiment, we made the following conclusions:1) According to the result of our survey, we find that many students learn English words by rote instead of using some learning strategies.(2)When training students’ meta-cognitive strategies, we encourage them to make study plans based on their own conditions and study the textbook on their own; and we use cognitive strategies in learning English words in textbooks; integrate the social and affective training with group learning and club activities.(3)This strategy training not only improves their awareness of using strategies to study words, but also enhances their grade in vocabulary test.This study offers theoretical references for future researchers in the respect of English Vocabulary Learning Strategies. Due to the limitations of time and subjects, the research result differs to some extent. The author will continue the study among the subjects in their second year in this school; meanwhile the author suggests taking more consideration about the training and learners.