A Contrastive Research On(under-) Achievers’ Strategies For Acquiring English Vocabulary In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary is the cornerstone of English learning and is one of the most important parts of English as a language.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017)points out that effective selection and use of learning strategies is a means to help understand,express and improve learning efficiency,and is a necessary condition for students to form autonomous learning and lifelong learning capabilities.High school students should improve the quantity and quality of EVA based on the use of EVA strategies.Therefore,helping high school students to proficiently use various EVA strategies can be effective in English learning.To learn more about the current situation of EVA,this thesis investigates EVA strategies between achievers and underachievers by using questionnaire and through interview to find out the causes of the result,and proposes some suggestions.The thesis aims to answer three questions:(1)What is the overall situation of students’ use of EVA strategies?(2)What are the similarities and differences of different strategies between achievers and underachievers?(3)What are the causes of the differences? The author sent the questionnaire to 150 high school students(75 English achievers and 75 English underachievers)in Lingshi No.1 Senior High School.A total of 140 valid questionnaires were collected,and 10 students were interviewed randomly(5 English achievers and 5 English underachievers).Through analysis,the thesis draws the following conclusions:(1)Generally speaking,the common vocabulary strategies used by English achievers and English underachievers are cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies.English achievers use the three strategies well.The common vocabulary strategies used by English underachievers are cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies,and they use social affective strategies less.(2)In EVA perceptions,both English achievers and English underachievers disagree with the perception of mechanical memory.They agree with the perception of using words to learn vocabulary.English achievers agree with the perception of memorizing words in context;in meta-cognitive strategies,English achievers and English underachievers often use self-regulation strategies instead of selective attention strategies.English achievers often use pre-planning strategies,self-monitoring strategies and self-regulation strategies.English underachievers often use self-regulation strategies;in cognitive strategies,the strategies often used by English achievers and English underachievers are connection and guessing strategies.English achievers often use connection,context,dictionary lookup,guessing and classification strategies,English underachievers often use connection,mechanical memory,guessing and translation strategies;in social affective strategies,English achievers and English underachievers don’t often use cooperative strategies,English achievers often use self-monitoring strategies,English underachievers don’t often use social affective strategies.(3)The causes for the above differences mainly include two aspects: on the one hand,students’ attitudes and habits.On the other hand,environment and teachers’ teaching style.In terms of attitudes of memorizing words,English underachievers are different from achievers.Achievers maintain positive attitudes when remembering words,while underachievers keep negative attitudes.In addition,achievers have developed good habits of memorizing words using different strategies,which is not easy for underachievers.In terms of environment,achievers will seize the opportunity to ask for help,but underachievers will not.In addition,teachers’ teaching style also affects students’ learning methods,and different methods taught by different teachers have different effects on students.After the above research,this thesis suggests that teachers should pay attention to teaching students in accordance with their aptitude,and use different targeted training methods for different types of students;teachers should pay attention to the choice of students’ vocabulary teaching methods and teach them to use different EVA strategies;teachers should pay attention to correcting students’ wrong EVA perceptions and learning strategies.