A Correlation Study On Vocabulary Learning Strategies And English Achievement Of Middle School Students In Ethnic Region

Among the current of inevitable and accelerating globalization, China, as the biggest developing country is keeping trying hard to integrate into the world and continuously attaching great importance to the communication tool—foreign language (especially English). The middle school stage is the most important period of the national English foundation laid. Therefore, middle school English teaching is very important to the improvement of national English ability. Vocabulary learning is a major and tough part of English learning, without any doubt, vocabulary learning strategies have profound significance in promoting the capacity of English learning and teaching. China is a multinational country, and the enhancement of minority groups’ English capacity weighs a lot in the overall promotion of English teaching in China.Many well-known domestic and foreign scholars have done lots of researches on vocabulary learning strategy, and they are all insightful for the definition and classification of vocabulary learning strategies. In general, vocabulary learning strategies can be roughly divided into three categories:metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social affective strategies, which are essential to English teaching and learning. According to the literature related to vocabulary learning strategies, these researches are mainly about status of strategies’selection of the senior high school students, English majors or college non-English Majors in their process of English learning. There is almost no research on the relationship between English vocabulary learning strategies and English achievement in minority areas. That is to say, research on English Vocabulary Teaching in minority areas is a blank. Therefore, this study on relevance of English vocabulary learning strategies and English test scores in the ethnic regions can help us to discover the characteristics of their English vocabulary learning and weak links in vocabulary learning, and suit the remedy to the case, finally to improve English teaching level. At the same time, it also can provide certain reference for English teaching research in the minority areas.By this study, the author tries to make these two aspects clear:(1) what’s the general situation of senior middle school students’uses of vocabulary learning strategies? (2) Is senior middle school students’ English test scores related to their learning strategies during their vocabulary acquisition? And what are they? Questionnaire survey and interview methods are adopted in this study. By conducting a questionnaire survey in No.4 Senior Middle School of Sangzhi County (located in northern-west part of Hunan province, the minority region) with 150 senior middle school students answering the questionnaire and interviewing 3 English teachers, results of questionnaires and interviews were collected and then were analyzed correspondingly, which could be the valuable experiences for senior middle school students to acquire vocabulary learning strategies rationally. From the above analysis we can see:VLS of students in this school are indeed relevant to their English achievement; among the 19 secondary indexes of VLS,17 were positively related to their English performance, and 2 were not through the correlation test.In the end summary goes as follow:firstly, vocabulary learning should be placed in proper position among English teaching of senior middle schools in ethnic areas. Teachers cannot overstate its status neither ignore its importance in improving English achievement. Secondly, because the high school students in the region did not accept the guidance of professional vocabulary learning strategies, there are many problems in their choice of strategy. Thirdly, while teaching vocabulary in this region, teachers should arouse the enthusiasm of students, develop students’self-learning ability, meanwhile they must change their traditional teaching methods. Fourthly, single strategy application was not good for effectively grasp of vocabularies, hence we should suggest students to use as many strategies as possible while learning vocabularies. Fifthly, to carry out the new curriculum reform requirements, we should strengthen exploratory and cooperative learning between teachers and students and develop the cooperative learning ability between teachers and students and between students and students.Still, this thesis has some limitations for the restricted samples.