A Study Of The Application Of Cognitive Strategies To English Vocabulary Learning In Secondary Vocational School

English is a public compulsory course in secondary vocational school,and vocabulary plays a quite important role in secondary vocational school English learning.The size of vocabulary to some extent has a direct effect on secondary vocational school students' English language learning and communication.However,the current situation of vocabulary teaching and learning in secondary vocational school is not greatly satisfying and the vocabulary teaching and learning efficiency is time-consuming but low-effect.Moreover,many researchers have made some studies about English vocabulary teaching and learning in colleges and middle schools and have put forward corresponding vocabulary learning strategies,but few have involved secondary vocational school vocabulary learning.Cognitive strategy is an effective and efficient vocabulary learning strategy which can improve students' vocabulary learning efficiency;give a man a fish,and he eats for a day;teach him how to fish,and he eats for a lifetime.Based on the reasons above,this study applied six cognitive strategies to conduct an instructional experiment for 16 weeks so as to address the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation of students' application of vocabulary learning cognitive strategies in secondary vocational school?(2)How are cognitive strategies applied to students' vocabulary learning in secondary vocational school ?(3)Can the application of cognitive strategies improve vocabulary learning outcomes?This study is based on the Cognitive Constructivism and O'Malley and Chamot's(2001)classification of learning strategies.The author reviewed the definition and the classification of learning strategy and vocabulary learning strategy,took Oxford's,O'Malley and Chamot's and Cohen's strategy training models for reference,adopted the teaching model of Strategy-Based Instruction according to the previous research,the existing research condition and the secondary vocational students' needs,and conducted vocabulary learning strategy training for the selected secondary vocational students and finally counted up and analyzed the results.This study employed questionnaire to investigate the current situation of students' application of vocabulary learning cognitive strategies in secondary vocational school and the author conducted classroom teaching experiment of Strategy-Based Instruction for 16 weeks.Subjects of this study were students majoring in nursing from Grade One in Bijie Medical College.The students were respectively from two different classes in Grade One.For the two classes selected,one class was considered as the Experimental Class and the other class was considered as the Control Class.There were 60 students in each class.In order to guarantee the validity and reliability of this study,students from Experimental Class and Control Class were asked to take a vocabulary size test and an English comprehensive proficiency tests before the experimental study began.In this study,the author was the English instructor of the two classes.The English instructor adopted cognitive strategy model to conduct vocabulary teaching and learning in Experiment Class but non-cognitive strategy model in Control Class.In the whole instructional experiment,the instructor conducted vocabulary teaching and learning by combining the strategy training with strategy-based instruction(SBI).After ending the experiment,students in two classes were asked to take the post-test of vocabulary size test and the contents of the test were the same.The Excel Sheet from software Window 7 was used to analyze the result of questionnaire and an Independent Samples T-test was used to analyze the statistics of the instructional experiment by the software SPSS 17.0.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)The frequency of cognitive strategies use from the highest to the lowest in secondary vocational school is in turn : repetition strategy > phonetics strategy > note taking strategy > rote learning strategy > grouping strategy > key word strategy > doing exercise > looking up dictionary >word formation > context strategy>reading strategy>association strategy > contrasting strategy.(2)It is an effective and efficient to conduct vocabulary teaching and learning by combining the strategy training with strategy-based instruction(SBI).(3)The application of cognitive strategies can improve students' vocabulary learning outcomesThe results of this study have important enlightenment to the secondary vocational school English vocabulary teaching and learning.For instructors,the results of this study can be regarded as a reference for their vocabulary teaching.For learners,the results of this study can guide them to learn vocabulary more efficiently,thus to improve vocabulary teaching and learning efficiency.However,due to the time limitation and the small sample,there are some shortcomings.The author will continue learning and doing researches so as to remedy those defects.