On The Application Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies To Word Attack For Non-English Majors

Vocabulary is very important for foreign language teaching and learning, however, its status in language acquisition has been changing from time to time. Nowadays, vocabulary is no longer sidelined in the research of the second language learning and in language teaching. With this shift in emphasis, teachers are faced with the challenge of how to help their students learn the words in the target language efficiently. Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to teach their students some useful vocabulary learning strategies in the course of teaching.This thesis covers the learning strategies, the vocabulary learning strategies and the guessing strategies, especially the clues that help the learners guess the unfamiliar words, in which a close attention is paid to the semantic field, synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms, all giving some hints to guessing the unfamiliar words. In addition, the thesis concerns the four vocabulary teaching approaches: contextual acquisition research, strategy instruction, and explicit instruction and classroom activities.Based on the data obtained from the questionnaire and the vocabulary test, the present author employs SPSS 13.0 and analyzes the different strategies used by the participants so as to know what strategies are most often used or seldom used by the subjects. According to the T test, the significant differences reflect the differences in the strategies used by Band I and Band II subjects. What is more, the correlation coefficient indicates that the strategies used correlate with the learning outcomes.As a result, the teacher can teach the Band I students some useful strategies to improve their learning outcomes, especially to teach them how to guess the unfamiliar words according to the semantic field.