A Comparative Study On Beliefs And Strategy Use Of Vocabulary Learning Between College Students Of Arts And Science

Vocabulary learning plays an essential part in the process of language learning. Wilkins (1972) pointed that without grammar, very little could be conveyed; but without vocabulary, nothing could be conveyed." Therefore, since the1970s, with the research interest shifting from "how to teach" to "how to learn", the research on vocabulary learning strategies adopted by students in their second language learning has caught much attention of many researchers made abroad and at home. A large number of researches have been carried out since the1980s. While in China, researchers didn’t pay any attention to vocabulary learning until the early20th century. Gu (1994) carried out a qualitative study on vocabulary learning strategies adopted by the good and poor English proficiency learners, which marked the beginning of the research of VLS in China. However, it’s surprising to find out that the researches on the influence of major differences upon vocabulary learning strategies in China are relatively few, especially the empirical comparison researches on the vocabulary learning strategy use of college students of Arts and Science.Based on the researches carried out both abroad and at home, a comparative study on the differences of vocabulary learning strategy use of students of Arts and Science is carried out in attempt to answer the following four questions:1) What’s the overall pattern of Vocabulary Learning beliefs and Strategy use of non-English majors?2) What’s the overall pattern of Vocabulary Learning Beliefs and strategy use of students of Arts and Science?3) Are there any differences and similarities in the preference of vocabulary learning belief and strategy use of the two types of students? If there are, what are they?4) What specific significant differences do students of Arts and Science have in using vocabulary learning strategies?Both quantitative and qualitative studies are adopted in this study. The questionnaire, adapted from Gu&Johnson (1996), includes three parts:questionnaire requirements and personal information, vocabulary learning belief, vocabulary learning strategies. It is administrated to147college sophomores (75sophomores majoring in petroleum engineering and72sophomores majoring in law) from SWPU and a small part of students are invited to the semi-structured interviews. The SPSS13.0is adopted to analyze the data collected from the questionnaire by employing the methods of both descriptive analysis and independent samples T-test.The main findings are as follows:1) All the college non-English majors highly believe that vocabulary should be learned in context and vocabulary should be studied and put into use instead of acquiring through rote-memorization. Most students adopt the vocabulary learning strategies generally.2) The Arts students believe more that words should be learned in context while the Science students believe more that words should be studied through application. There are significant differences in belief of Use between Arts students and Science students.3) Comparatively, more Arts students adopt more strategies than the Science students in their vocabulary learning. Cognitive strategies are most frequently adopted by both the Arts students and Science students. However, the Arts students employ Social/Affective strategies the while the Science students adopt the Metacognitive strategies with the lowest frequency.4) There are significant differences in their use of strategies of Selective-attention, Dictionary, Note-taking, Grouping, Contextualization and Cooperation.