A Study On The Effect Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Vocabulary Acquisition

In foreign language teaching and learning, vocabulary 4earning is one of the hottest topics among language learners and teachers,for vocabulary mastery and expansion is of great importance in developing learners' language abilities of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Researchers and teachers are concerned with questions like: how to help students learn vocabulary actively and effectively, how to improve their abilities to use vocabulary, etc. In recent years, the researches into vocabulary learning strategies provide a new perspective for pondering over those questions. Through literature review,we find that most of the researchers have focused on general cognitive strategies but ignored metacognitive strategies. Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive skill which involves an ability to consciously use metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor, manage and evaluate the learning process. Once having a good command of metacognitiye strategies, students are able to assess the situation, make plans, select appropriate strategies, monitor the learning process and evaluate the learning performance.Owing to the importance of metacognitive strategies to language learning, the present study focuses on metacognitive strategy instruction and its impact on English majors in vocabulary learning. The present study aims to explore the relationship between metacognitive strategy training and learner's vocabulary acquisition from the following four aspects:1. Can metacognitive strategy training effectively increase students'metacognitive awareness?2. Can metacogntive strategy training play a positive role in the students' receptive vocabulary acquisition?3. Does metacognitive strategy, training influence the students' controlled productive vocabulary acquisition? 4. Does metacognitive strategy training have a positive effect on the students' free productive vocabulary acquisition?In this study we conducted a strategy training with 60 freshmen from a certain University in Hunan, which lasted 12 weeks. Before the training, the author made an investigation about the students' use of metacognitive strategies in vocabulary learning. Based on the result of the investigation, the metacognitive strategy training in this study centers on the four metacognitive strategies: enriching students' metacognitive knowledge; setting a goal and planning vocabulary learning; monitoring vocabulary learning behavior and evaluating vocabulary learning performance. After the instruction, the same questionnaire was administered to the subjects to investigate the impact of the training on the strategy use. Three instruments were used to measure three dimensions of the subjects' vocabulary knowledge: 1. the Vocabulary Levels Test(Nation, 1990) for receptive vocabulary, 2. the productive version of the Vocabulary Levels Test(Laufer and Nation, 1995, 1998) for controlled productive vocabulary size, and 3. the Lexical Frequency Profile(Laufer and Nation, 1995) for the richness of free productive vocabulary in free Writings. All the data collected was input into the computer and analyzedby SPSS 12.0.The results show that after the training, the students' in the experimental group use advance planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluation more often than those in the control group. As far as these three metacognitive strategies are concerned, significant difference can be found inthe two groups. As to the vocabulary acquisition, the subjects in the experimental group have made more progress than those in the control group. To be specific, in the acquisition of receptive vocabulary, significant difference exists in the two groups at 2,000 and 3,000 word levels. In the acquisition of controlled productive vocabulary, significant difference can be found at 2,000 word level. As far as free productive vocabulary is concerned, no significant difference exists between the two groups. On the basis of the data analysis, we have come to a conclusion that explicit metacognitive strategy training has a significant positive effect on the vocabulary acquisition of Chinese English majors. The findings of this study, we hope, will make contributions to the English vocabulary teaching and learning in China.