Research On Vocabulary Cognitive Learning Strategies Of Senior High School Students

Based on cognitive psychology theories and some related vocabulary cognitive learning theories,hundreds of researchers at home and abroad have studied the cognitive process and different vocabulary learning strategies of students with different methodologies,but most of the researchers pay their attention to college students and their researches focus on the learning attitudes and strategy choices of students.Barely do they discuss the differences of liberal arts students and science students in learning and the relationship between different learning strategies and students’ score.Nowadays,with the fast development of our society,against the background of new curriculum and test-oriented education,students’ belief about learning have changed a lot.Combining theories of cognitive psychology with the findings of some scholars,such as O’Malley,Chamot and Dong Min,this research investigates the vocabulary cognitive learning strategy of high school students.We choose students from four classes in a middle school named D in Hanzhong as main respondents.This research combines questionnaire surveys with interviews to try to answer the following three questions: 1.What do we know about high school students concerning vocabulary learning? 2.Are there any differences between high school students in choosing vocabulary strategy? 3.Does there exist any correlation between learning strategy and English score? What kind of correlation? We can get some information about students’ vocabulary learning concepts and choices of vocabulary cognitive learning strategy from questionnaires;we can get to know why specific student chooses specific learning strategy from interviews;we can get the correlation between strategy choices and English score from students’ grade and questionnaires.After calculating,we can get the mean and standard deviation of each strategy.We can also find the differences between liberal arts students and science students in using strategies and different choices of vocabulary cognitive learning strategy of high-score group and low-score group.Findings are as follows: 1.Most of the students in senior high school think it is helpful to learn words through rote memory and context;2.The most frequently used strategies by students are taking notes,repeating,practicing;the least frequently used is classification.;liberal arts students do better than science students in using vocabulary cognitive learning strategies.3.The mean of vocabulary learning strategy of high-score group is higher than that of low-score group and there exits a positive correlation between the diversity of strategy choices and English grades.At last,this research offers some suggestions on vocabulary teaching: First,teachers should combine vocabulary teaching with culture teaching;Second,teachers should encourage students to learn vocabulary through practicing;Third,teachers should help students to use appropriate strategies;Finally,teachers should adopt different teaching strategies with different students.This research will provide some guidance for high school students on how to build English vocabulary more effectively.