English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Training For Higher Vocational Nursing Students: An Empirical Study

Vocabulary, which plays an important role in the language competence, is one of the most concerned issues in EFL/L2 teaching and learning. In the past few decades, with the development of general linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, researchers'attention has shifted from teaching to learning. Language learners become the center of language teaching and learning. Since 1990s, quite a lot of researches have been carried out to explore the relationship between the language learning strategies and second language acquisition. It is found out that language learning strategies training can be of help to second language acquisition. So vocabulary learning strategy training becomes the new focus of researchers both at home and abroad. However, in the existing studies, there have been few studies that choose nursing students in higher vocational school as subjects.The author of this thesis carries out an experimental study on the effectiveness of strategy training on vocabulary learning. This research aims to investigate the current situation of VLS use among the higher vocational nursing majors, and to study whether VLST had positive effect on enlarging the learners'vocabulary size. Based on Schmitt's classification of VLSs, the author made a research on 102 second year students majoring in nursing in Nantong Vocational and Technical Higher School of Health. Questionnaire, and pretest and posttest of vocabulary size were used in this study. The data were collected and analyzed with the help of SPSS 17.0.The result of this research shows that the nursing majors in vocational high school use a large range of VLSs, among which the determination strategies and the cognitive strategies are the most frequently used and the metacognitive strategies and the memory strategies are the least used. Six specific VLS in the subcategory of . MET and MEM were selected as the target strategies in this research. Through one-semester VLST, the vocabulary size of the participants in EG improved significantly than that in CG. The author analyzed the results and summarized some pedagogical implications.