A Study On Vocabulary Learning Strategies Employed By Non-English Major Graduates

Vocabulary, as one of the vital part of students'English language learning, has attracted the attention of more and more researchers from both home and abroad. It is high time to explore the question of how to learn English vocabulary efficiently and effectively. Therefore, in recent years, linguists have done a series of researches on vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies, and their efforts have borne fruits.This thesis aims to investigate and analyze vocabulary learning strategies employed by non-English major graduate students. The subjects are 70 graduate students from Hebei Medical University specialized in medicine. The research questions are listed as follows: 1) What is the overall pattern of graduate students'vocabulary learning beliefs and preferred learning strategies? 2) How do the investigated students use some specific vocabulary learning strategies? 3) What are the differences of strategies used by good and poor students? 4) What are the differences of strategies used by male and female students? The classification of vocabulary learning strategies is adopted from that of Gu & Johnson, then through a questionnaire and a vocabulary test to collect data. All the data is processed by the Statistics Package for Social Science (SPSS11.5), and then analyzed systematically. As for the comparison of the strategies used by good and poor students, the representative samples are chosen according to their English scores of national entrance examination for graduates and a vocabulary test designed by the author. The top ten and the bottom ten are chosen to be compared. Concerning the choice of male and female students, the representatives are chosen randomly.There are three parts in vocabulary belief, namely: repetition, context and use. Regarding vocabulary learning strategies, there are also three types: metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. The three kinds of strategies correlate with and influence each other. The results of this thesis are listed as follows:1. As for learning beliefs, the investigated students prefer use, then context, and repetition comes last. Generally speaking, the students employ many kinds of vocabulary learning strategies, including metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. Cognitive strategies are the most frequently used one, and then come metacognitive strategy, social/affective strategy.2. After analyzing some specific vocabulary learning strategies, the author finds out that dictionary use is the most frequently used strategy, next comes guessing and note taking ranks the third.3. In general, good students employ more strategies than poor students, such as cognitive strategies.4. There are differences between male students and female students with regard to the strategies used.To sum up, this thesis finds that there is close relationship between vocabulary beliefs and learners'learning results. Employing more strategies can help with students'vocabulary memory and development, and the use of strategies will influence students'test scores, or even English learning success. Of course, it does not mean that the more strategies one use, the better one will learn. Instead, the key point here is to see whether the strategies used are suitable for the individual learner. To the graduate students specializing in medicine, it is extremely important for them to master certain amount of English vocabulary and grasp some strategies to facilitate their learning. Therefore, this thesis puts forward some constructive suggestions on vocabulary learning strategies for English teachers and learners to draw on.