An Investigation Into Students' Use Of English Vocabulary Learning Strategies In A Senior High School

Vocabulary,pronunciation and grammar are the most essential elements of a language.Of these three elements,vocabulary comes to the first place in language teaching and learning.In the past decades,quite a lot studies were conducted to examine the relationship between the use of vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary learning achievements.Researchers also attempted to explore the vocabulary learning strategies used by successful and unsuccessful learners.Nevertheless,the subjects of these studies were mainly university students or college students,and very few researchers have focused their studies on senior high school students.The study presented here tends to investigate the use of students' English vocabulary learning strategies in Nanchang No.15 Senior High School.It aims at finding out the overall patterns of the vocabulary learning strategies used by students,exploring the differences in the use of vocabulary learning strategies between the high achievers and the low achievers.It also intends to examine the differences in the use of vocabulary learning strategies between the male and the female students.Finally,it attempts to reveal the relationship between the students' vocabulary learning proficiency and their use of strategies.120 second-year students were selected from a senior high school.Of all these subjects,55 were male students and 65 were female students.The data was collected by a questionnaire,a vocabulary proficiency test and an interview,and then it was analyzed by descriptive analysis,Independent-Samples T-Test and correlation analysis.A number of findings were obtained regarding the students' use of vocabulary learning strategies.First of all,a general statistical description showed that the students in this study used vocabulary learning strategies at a medium level.Selective attention,self-initiation,contextual guessing,and dictionary strategies for comprehension were the most frequently used strategies,while visual encoding,auditory encoding,semantic encoding and contextual encoding were the least used strategies.Besides,the high achievers differed from the low proficient students in the use of dictionary strategies,note-taking strategies and encoding strategies.Moreover,the male student and the female students showed a significant difference in the use of most vocabulary learning strategies.On the whole,the female students outperformed the male students in the use of most strategies.Finally,there existed significant positive correlation between students' vocabulary learning proficiency and their use of strategies.On the basis of the results in this study,the author offered some implications for English teachers and students in senior high schools.Firstly,teachers should play a leading role in cultivating students' use of vocabulary learning strategies.For the low proficient students,teachers should pay more attention to explain dictionary strategies,usage oriented note-taking strategies and encoding strategies for them and guide them to use these strategies.For the male students,teachers should encourage them to use more guessing strategies,dictionary strategies,note-taking strategies and rehearsal strategies.Finally,it is of great significance for students themselves to improve their vocabulary knowledge by adopting vocabulary learning strategies autonomously.