A Survey Of English Vocabulary Learning Beliefs And Strategies Adopted By Chinese Non-English Majors

Learning strategies are techniques, approaches or deliberate actions that students take in order to facilitate the learning, recall of both linguistic and content area information (Chamot 1987). Vocabulary learning strategies, as specific learning strategies, can be defined as intentional behavior and thoughts that learners make use of during learning in order to better help them understand, learn or remember the target language vocabulary.Over the past twenty years, there has been an increase in research on vocabulary learning strategies both at home and abroad. Most researchers in the West conducted their research with native speakers as their subjects while many scholars in China investigated Chinese English majors and sophomore non-English majors as their subjects. However, to date no study has dealt solely with English vocabulary beliefs and strategies of Chinese freshmen non-English majors, so the author makes a tentative study on it.The present survey aims to explore the overall patterns of English vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies employed by Chinese freshmen non-English majors, to further probe whether there exist statistically significant differences between Band-1 students and Band-3 students, and to investigate what beliefs and strategies are correlated with the students' proficiency.The present research carries out a survey on 155 non-English majors (80 Band-1 students and 75 Band-3 students), by drawing on the previous studies on vocabulary learning strategies both at home and abroad. In this survey, a questionnaire, which is adapted from Gu and Johnson's (1996) by Fan Lin (2002), is administered to collect data on learners' vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies. In addition, a vocabulary recall test is taken, which is selected from The Vocabulary Levels Test (VLT) (Nation 1990:267-271).