A Correlational Study Of Chinese Senior High School Students' Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Their English Vocabulary Knowledge

There was a movement away from a predominantly teaching-oriented perspective to one which included interest in how the actions of learners might affect their acquisition of language after 1980s; hence the study of language learning strategies came to flourish. Since vocabulary is essential to language and crucially important for English learning, vocabulary studies have received increased attention recently judging by the number of publications in the field. A lot of panoramic studies concerning vocabulary learning strategies employed by English majors and non-English majors have been conducted (Gu Yongqi, 1994 ; Wen Qiufang, 1996a, 1996b; Wang Wenyu, 1998; Wang Xia, 1998; Liu Jinkai, 1999; Duan Cheng, 1999; Zhang Ping, 2001) with relatively little research however on correlation between high school students'vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary knowledge and on specific vocabulary learning strategies most suitable to certain kinds of vocabulary learning tasks.This research attempts to fill this gap with questionnaire to investigate vocabulary learning strategies used by senior high school students first, with vocabulary test to evaluate students'vocabulary knowledge, with further statistical analyses about relations between various vocabulary learning strategies and sub-scores of vocabulary test, and finally explore whether some specific vocabulary learning strategies are significantly correlated with certain aspects of vocabulary knowledge, thus especially appropriate and efficient for fulfilling some vocabulary learning tasks.By quantitative and qualitative approaches, the study aims to investigate the correlation between English Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLS) and vocabulary knowledge of 117 senior high grade two students. Four research objectives are included: (1) whether there are statistically significant differences on vocabulary learning beliefs between high-score group and low-score group; (2) whether there are statistically significant differences on vocabulary learning strategies between the two groups; (3) are there any statistically significant differences on the mastery of different aspects of vocabulary knowledge between high-score and low-score groups; (4) whether there are statistically significant correlations between certain vocabulary learning strategies and sub-vocabulary knowledge, thus indicating that the appropriate use of some VLS does have an obvious facilitating impact on the mastery of certain aspects of English vocabulary knowledge.The vocabulary learning beliefs used in this study were adopted by Gu Yongqi and questionnaire designed by Oxford (revised). Statistical analysis by SPSS 11.5 indicates:1) Although there are differences on various vocabulary learning beliefs between high-score and low-score groups, significant differences have not been demonstrated by statistical analysis.2) There are no statistically significant differences on metacognitve, cognitive, social, affective as well as memory/consolidation VLS between the two groups.3) Apart from hyponymy, statistical analysis indicates significant differences on vocabulary knowledge of spelling, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, conversion, word-formation, collocation and syntactic behavior between high-score and low-score groups.4) The hypothesis that some VLS significantly correlate with mastery of certain aspects of vocabulary knowledge has been verified to some extent, with specific significant correlations between metacognitive VLS advance planning with antonymy, extensive reading with hyponomy, dictionary use with antonymy and social VLS with antonymy have been demonstrated.Research findings concur with previous studies conducted in the relevant field to great extent and can give a comprehensive reflection of Chinese senior high students'vocabulary learning. Some pedagogical suggestions are provided on the basis of detailed analyses of research outcomes as well.