Effect Of Vocabulary Strategy Training In Self-Regulated EFL Learning At The Secondary Level In China

Nowadays,'Individualized teaching',a popular way of teaching,has given the teachers a headache,because of the large student number in each class.Therefore,many educators has changed their focus from figuring out 'how teachers should teach' to 'how students should learn'.It is their job to improve students' lifelong learning ability.Self-regulated learning is one of the key factors of lifelong learning.It also has been one of the key focuses in the educational field.This study chooses a class of 51 students from a Key Middle School in Wuhan as participants.Based on the Self-regulated learning process and combined with a questionnaire,a vocabulary level test,a structured interview,strategy check lists,learning journals and a weekly learning journal,this study tries to explore the affects of a term-long vocabulary strategy instruction on the participants' vocabulary size,cognitive learning strategies,metacognitive strategies,self-efficacy,and most importantly,on the actual strategy use of the students without the teacher's help.According to the results,the findings are:1)students' overall vocabulary size has been improved.And the vocabulary of Level 1 to Level 8 has shown a bigger improvement over the vocabulary of Level 9 to Level 13.However,the instruction has negative affect on the vocabulary of Level 14;2)as for the cognitive learning strategies,the use frequency of all of the five strategies has seen a significant rise,namely,selection attention>dictionary use>guessing>word structure>word memory;3)in terms of the metacognitive strategies,students has done better to different degree in four aspects,namely,setting learning goals,monitoring,evaluating and reflecting.But when it comes to failure attribution,students tend to choose objective reason,like heavy schoolwork or lack of time.Only one of them mentions subjective reasons,like misuse of the strategies or unwise time arrangement.4)students' self-efficacy of all of the five cognitive strategies has been significantly enhanced;5)after the instruction,even without the teacher's help,students has shown an ideal use of the teaching content.It is noteworthy that compared with the low achievers,the high achievers display a more various vocabulary resources,a wider range of strategy use,a more specific set of learning goals and more timely vocabulary revision.