A Study On Middle School Students’ Self-regulatory Capacity In English Vocabulary Learning

Self-regulated learning has been the focus of educational psychology study since the 1980s.Since D?rnyei(2005)took the lead to introduce self-regulated learning into the field of second language vocabulary acquisition,a series of research relevant to self-regulatory capacity in vocabulary learning have also emerged.Students’ vocabulary learning not only needs English teachers’ direct teaching,but also their own adjustment of cognition,emotion,motivation and environment,so as to attain learning goals.The majority of prior research has been on college students and senior high school students,however,the self-regulation of middle school students in vocabulary learning receives less attention.This study selected 159 Grade 8 students from a middle school in Suzhou,Jiangsu Province as the research subjects,with social cognitive theory and action control theory as theoretical foundations,and employed the self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning scale developed by Tseng et al.(2006)and vocabulary test as the research tools to explore the current situation of middle students’ self-regulation in English vocabulary learning.The specific research questions are as follows:1)What is the current situation of middle school students’ self-regulatory capacity in vocabulary learning?2)What is the relationship between middle school students’ self-regulatory capacity and their vocabulary level?These are the results:1)Overall,Grade 8 students’ SRCvoc is satisfactory and above the average level.The commitment control is the strongest of the five,while the emotion control subscale is the poorest.There is no significant difference in SRCvoc between male and female in this research.2)Vocabulary test scores of students are positively correlated with SRCvoc,with commitment control and environmental control having the strongest and lowest correlations respectively.Between low-level and high-level students as well as between low-level and medium-level students,there are significant differences in SRCvoc,while there is no statistical difference between medium-level and high-level students.In particular,the differences lie in every aspect between low level,and medium level&high level students.Finally,according to the results,this study puts forward some specific suggestions for English teachers and students,and also points out the limitations of this study and future directions of self-regulation in vocabulary learning in the future.It is hoped that more theories and findings will enrich the research on self-regulation of foreign language/second language vocabulary learning.