A Study On English Vocabulary Learning Beliefs And Strategies Of Chinese Science And Engineering Freshmen

In recent years, the role of vocabulary knowledge in second language learning has been increasingly valued. Among all the factors that may affect vocabulary learning outcomes, vocabulary learning strategy is the most important one. And belief about vocabulary learning is one of the main factors that can influence learners'choice and employment of learning strategies. Many researchers abroad and at home performed related researches, but few of them took college freshmen, especially Science and Engineering freshmen, as subjects. In fact, there are much more college students majoring in Science and Engineering than those in other majors in China. These freshmen are often confused and worried when confronted with so many new words in college English. Therefore, finding their existing problems and assisting them form proper vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies are very helpful for their vocabulary learning and future English study.The present study aims at exploring learners'beliefs and strategies of English vocabulary learning. It also tries to find out which strategies are correlated with the students'vocabulary test scores. Participants are 107 Science and Engineering freshmen of Grade 2005 from an Architectural Engineering Institute. The instruments include a questionnaire, which is adapted from that of Gu and Johnson (1996), and a vocabulary recall test paper designed by the author. With the help of the statistical software SPSS 11.0 for windows, the analyses of the data indicate that:(1) The freshmen investigated in this study score the lowest on acquisition beliefs and value practice belief highly. (2) The freshmen do employ some strategies in their vocabulary learning processes, though the frequency of use is not high. Among the strategies at metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective dimensions, only cognitive strategies are comparatively frequently used. The other two broad categories of VLS are not commonly used. Among the subcategories of cognitive strategies, the most commonly used ones are rote memorization, dictionary use, guessing from context, while the least used ones are visual and auditory encoding strategies, contextual encoding strategies, and grouping strategies. (3) All the...