A Study On Vocabulary Learning Strategy Training For English Majors Of Vocational College

Vocabulary-learning is an extremely important component in English teaching and learning and is also one of the cruxes in English learning for Chinese learners. The extent to which vocabulary is mastered exerts profound influence on the listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation skills of foreign language. Hence a host of scholars and teachers explored vocabulary learning and teaching in an attempt to help students improve their efficiency of vocabulary-learning. Since recent two odd decades, increasing number of studies on vocabulary learning strategy (VLS) and VLS training provided a new angle for vocabulary-learning research, and the achievements are fruitful. However, compared to studies on other learning strategies, those on VLSs are almost at their infancy, with many issues concerning VLSs unsettled and the effects of training on VLSs yet to be further verified, not least studies on the training of VLSs for vocational college students are rare. Thus the research into VLSs training like present one is called for.Based on previous research into VLSs and VLSs training, adopting the revised questionnaire designed by Fan Lin and Wang Qinghua (2002:209-221), which was in turn adapted from that of Gu and Johnson(1996:643-679), and selecting Schmitt's vocabulary level test (VLT) (the 5000-word level), the present study administered a questionnaire and a vocabulary level test on the 101business English majors from two classes of a polytechnic college in Jiangxi Province. Based on the results of the questionnaire, the writer picked out five subcategories of VLSs as the target to be instructed (i.e. Reviewing and Testing, Association, Imagery, Word Formation, and Grouping), and trained one of the two classes (50 students) mentioned in the use of the five VLSs for a span of two months, with the other class receiving no training but being kept the most consistent possible with the former in other aspects. In the end of the training, the same questionnaire and similar VLT were administered to both classes, and their results were compared with those before the training and both were analyzed using SPSS. The results suggest that: 1) The use of most VLSs by English majors of vocational college is at a medium level;2) The training can significantly improve the participants'use of VLSs on the whole and motivate their vocabulary-learning;3) The experimental class made some progress in vocabulary proficiency, but only a few of the strategies significantly associate with vocabulary proficiency, which indicates that the training did not have an apparent influence on vocabulary learning in this study.Subsequently, the results are discussed and analyzed in the thesis, from which some suggestions and implications are advanced as following: 1) VLSs training is viable and good for improving learners'use of vocabulary learning strategies and their vocabulary proficiency; 2) Learners'interest, motivation, attitude, belief and other affective factors exerts influence on the training, so the teacher should try to make the training more interesting and utilitarian and win learners'positive attitude towards it.3) Teacher should encourage students to deploy all kinds of VLSs flexibly in accordance with different words and figure out their own best way to learn. In the end, the thesis lists and reflects upon the problems and defects of the research and puts forward several suggestions for further research.