A Study Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Training Used By Non-English Majors

In foreign language teaching and learning, vocabulary learning is one of the hottest topics among language learners and teachers, for vocabulary ability is essential in developing the language abilities of learners. In language teaching research fields, researchers and teachers are concerned with questions like: how to help the students learn vocabulary actively and effectively, how to improve their abilities of using vocabulary, how to help them realize the long-term retention of vocabulary, etc. In recent years, the researches into vocabulary learning provide a new perspective to think about those questions.In this thesis, the author attempts to base her research on the previous ones on this topic. By training the students in vocabulary strategies, the researcher tries to find out whether the strategies are helpful for the students to improve their vocabulary learning abilities or not. In the process of training, the author also helps the students to make self-plan, self-management and self-evaluation about the vocabulary learning themselves. After a period of training, the researcher designs the tests and uses SPSS to analyze the data collected in the test, to evaluate the effectiveness of the training and gets some findings about the study.According to the taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategies done by Schmitt, the researcher chooses three strategies as the training targets. The three vocabulary learning strategies involved in the training are: guess the word meaning from context (the context strategy); keep a vocabulary notebook (the notebook strategy); guess the word meaning from the knowledge about word-formation (the word-formation strategy). The subjects in this study are 75 first-year students from a university in Nanjing. The training lasts for four weeks. By using SPSS to analyze the data, the researcher gets such findings: The context strategy is helpful for the students to guess the meaning of the unknown words from context; the notebook strategy is also helpfulfor the students to memorize the new words; yet the word-formation strategy does not have much effect on guessing new words' meaning. After the test, the researcher designs the questionnaire, which aims to find out the students' ideas and beliefs about the strategy training and ask them to evaluate themselves about their performance in the training and test. The results of the questionnaire are generally coincident with those of testing. On the whole, the training of vocabulary learning strategies has positive influence on vocabulary learning, and most of the students think that the training of vocabulary strategies is meaningful and helpful for them, and most of them express their supportive attitude towards the training. At the end of the thesis, the researcher gives her considerations about the limitation and defect of the current study.