A Study On English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of College Non-English Majors

Vocabulary is crucially important to second language learning. Nevertheless, compared to grammar, the teaching and learning of vocabulary have been neglected for a long time in the field of second language acquisition. It was not until in the mid 1980s that research into vocabulary has again become one of the hot topics in second language acquisition. In recent years it has attracted more and more interest from researchers, scholars, educationalists and teachers. One of the important aspects of second language vocabulary acquisition is concerned with vocabulary learning strategies.This thesis reports a survey study on the use of the vocabulary learning strategies of the college non-English majors. The participants are from four classes at Sichuan University in China. The Learning Strategy Hypothesis (O'Malley and Chamot 2001) claims that the use of learning strategies will promote the success of language learning; strategies that more actively involve the learner's mental process should be more effective for learning; these strategies can become automatic after repeated use. The Depth of Processing (or Elaboration) Hypothesis (Craik and Lockhart 1989) says that the retention of new information is conditional upon the level of the learners' processing, the deeper the information is processed, the more 'coding characteristics' it probably has and the better retention the learners will have. Recently, the Task-induced Involvement Load Hypothesis (Laufer and Hulstijn 2001) saysthat other things being equal, the retention of words depends on task-induced involvement load.On the basis of these theories, the study is intended to examine the general pattern of the use of vocabulary learning strategies, the relationship between the use of strategies and two kinds of vocabulary learning (receptive and productive), and whether the development of productive word knowledge is roughly the same as that of receptive word knowledge. The survey questionnaire is composed mainly based on the taxonomies proposed by Gu and Johnson (1996), Schmitt (1997), and Nation (2001), with reference to the related strategies.The following three major findings come from the study. First, the overall frequency of the students' vocabulary learning strategies is not high, just at the medium level. Among the strategy categories, dictionary strategy, affective strategy, rote repetition are used at the highest level of frequency. The students use the following categories of strategies at the medium level of frequency: metacognitive strategies, guessing strategies, note-taking strategies, contextualization, creating mental image, glossary, extracurricular activities, association strategies, and activation strategies. The students use social strategies at the lowest level of frequency.Second, the correlation analysis shows that there are a range of strategies in correlation with the vocabulary learning. Metacognitive strategies and affective strategies, extended dictionary use, note-taking strategies, activation strategies, creating mental image, contextual encoding, glossary strategy are all positively correlated with the two kinds of word knowledge; dictionary use for comprehension and association are just positively correlated with thereceptive vocabulary but not with the productive vocabulary; social strategies, guessing strategies and rote learning strategies have no correlation with the two dependent variables.Third, the students' productive vocabulary knowledge lags about half behind their receptive counterpart. There is a significant difference between them.Finally, after the discussion of the results, three theoretical hypotheses are confirmed, and some helpful suggestions about vocabulary learning strategies are put forward in the hope of helping Chinese college non-English majors to improve English study.