On English Vocabulary Building Strategies For Mongolian English Majors

Being the basic unit in any language, vocabulary plays a vital role in communication. A common is held in the field of ESL/EFL, that is vocabulary is the core element in the process of second language acquisition. Lewis(1993) points out that vocabulary learning is the center in SLL, it plays the most important role in it. Thus it is of great significance to study the vocabulary learning process, learners'attitudes towards it, and their strategies as well.The study in learning strategies starts from the early 1970s. Many researchers found that language learning strategies have positive effects on language learning (Rubbin,1995;Oxford, 1990). In China some researchers and practitioners in the field also investigated language learning strategies( Wen Qiufang,1995; Ma Guanghui,1997; Wu Xia & Wang Qiang,1998). Yet, most of theirs researchers concerned about those college students whose first language is Chinese while very little has been done with the purpose of investigating minority students who start their English learning rather late.The modern foreign language teaching theories have been putting great emphasis on the correlation between teaching and learning in the learning process, that is , what kind of learning strategies learners apply, how much efforts they exert, what kind of teaching material and method teachers use. This paper starts with an detailed introduction to the research background, Mongolian college students vocabulary learning situation, which is then followed by a literature review of definition of learning strategy and the three most influential classification of learning strategy, the definition of vocabulary building strategy, and vocabulary learning theories as well. The third part of the essay is a survey about Mongolian English majors vocabulary building strategies with a detailed justification of the purpose, assumptions, subjects, tolls, methods, results and data analysis. The fourth part of the essay discusses the training of the vocabulary learning strategies .The last part of the essay is the conclusion.The tools used in questionnaires are based on the linguist Oxford'Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL).Then the statistic tool----SPSS version 14.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data, and the results were discussed according to the statistics.The subjects are 36 second-year, 33 third-year Mongolian students majoring in English from Department of English, Inner Mongolia Teacher's University in an attempt to find out their attitudes towards vocabulary building, the application of vocabulary building strategies so that suitable methods can be used in classroom to improve Mongolian College students vocabulary learning efficiency.Questionnaire on the opinion about vocabulary learning, English learning strategies and vocabulary building strategies questionnaire were used as instrument to investigate the use of vocabulary building strategies. The statistic tool—SPSS version 14.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data.The results from the data analysis with SPSS14.0 mainly fall into three parts: 1). the subjects hold similar views on vocabulary learning, ranking from"vocabulary learning is the most important part in English learning"as the first one to"the best way to learn vocabulary is to memorize the words list"as the last one; 2). the subjects don't use learning strategies often; the subjects apply the memorizing strategy as the most frequently used one, in this aspect they hold the same opinion as the Han Chinese learners; The subjects also frequently use affective strategies, this is different from Han Chinese learners ,it may caused by the learning experience of their second language---Chinese. Based on the studies, it is suggested that vocabulary building strategies should be taught in the English classroom.