A Research On English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Used By Soldier Undergraduates In CAPF Colleges

Vocabulary plays a very important part in foreign language teaching and learning. The size of the vocabulary has a great influence on the learners' abilities of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. With the increasing awareness of the importance of vocabulary, the research into vocabulary learning and vocabulary learning strategies has become a more and more important subject in linguistics and language teaching.The present thesis reviews the background of the learning strategies and vocabulary learning strategies, presents the previous researchers' studies concerning language learning strategies and vocabulary learning strategies and illustrates some significant empirical studies on this subject. It is found out that some studies focus on finding out different vocabulary learning strategies, some try to investigate the employment of different strategies, some probe into the difference of use of strategies between the successful learners and less successful learners, and some discuss the training of the adoption of strategies. All these studies provide rich resource for the research into vocabulary strategies used by Chinese students.In this field, there is a "virgin land" which has rarely been touched by the researchers. That is the research on the vocabulary strategies employed by the soldier undergraduates in CAPF colleges. CAPF college is a branch of military colleges while military college is an indispensable part of our country's higher education. Taking as a whole, the soldier undergraduate is a very special group which is different from the civilian college student.In the present thesis, the author designs a questionnaire on vocabulary learning strategies according to Gu's and Schmitt's taxonomy of vocabulary strategies and the author's experiences of learning and teaching English, and characteristics of soldier undergraduates as well. 138 first-year soldier undergraduates are chosen as the subjects to respond to the questionnaire. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) is used for the statistical analysis of the data.The result shows the employment of vocabulary learning strategies by soldier undergraduates and it is very different compared to the civilian college students in Gu's and Wu and Wang's studies. (1) In general, vocabulary learning strategies are less used by soldier undergraduates than civilian college students; (2) Metacognitive strategies are much less used by soldier undergraduates compared to the civilian students. While in cognitive strategies, rote repetition and dictionary strategies are more used than guessing and contextualization strategies; (3) Compared to the civilian college students, soldier students use more social strategies but less affective strategies.The thesis also gives the explanation about the above findings. Meanwhile the author gets some implications: firstly, most soldier undergraduates have little interest in English learning, so the teachers should arouse their interest by choosing various teaching methods and materials to stimulate their learning motivation. Secondly, the teacher should give instruction on the employment of the vocabulary strategies so that the soldier undergraduates can be more independent and more autonomous in order to be more efficient in their language learning.