Investigation On English Vocabulary Learning Strategies For Postgraduates Study

During these decades, learning strategy attracts many researchers'attention, and vocabulary learning has been the bottleneck for foreign language study. Consequently, vocabulary learning strategy research becomes more important than other skills in learning strategy research. The research on vocabulary learning strategy mainly focused on investigation of high school students or college students and seldom focused on postgraduates'. This study, based on O'Malley and Chamot's definition and classification of learning strategies theoretically, was designed to concentrate on English vocabulary learning strategies, including metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies so as to find which kinds of learning strategies are appropriate for postgraduate, who are generally good-learners, to learn English words.The subjects of this research were 68 postgraduates randomly chosen from Harbin University of Science & Technology and Harbin Engineering University. Of these subjects, 34 were English majors and the other 34 were non-English majors. They were required to finish two vocabulary tests as well as a questionnaire concerning vocabulary learning strategies.The results of the questionnaire and vocabulary tests were collected and analyzed by SPSS 11.5. Statistical analysis was adopted to make an analysis. Descriptive statistics was obtained to summarize the overall patterns of vocabulary learning strategies used by these students. Thereupon, a T-test was performed to examine the differences in using vocabulary-learning strategies between English majored postgraduates and non-English majored postgraduates. Finally, a correlation analysis was made to determine how various strategies were related to vocabulary learning performance.Not only qualitative way but also quantitative way was adopted. Eight subjects were selected for in-depth study according to their performance in the two vocabulary knowledge tests and their self reports on vocabulary learning strategies, which formed the subjects for the qualitative study.The study ended with the following conclusions:1. Both of the English majored postgraduates and non-English majored postgraduates did employ learning strategies while memorizing English vocabulary, among which cognitive strategies are the most frequently used, followed by metacognitive strategies and then social/affective strategies to all of the subjects.2. The English majored postgraduates employed more strategies and more frequently than the non-English majored postgraduates did, especially the monitoring strategy, so it could be concluded that the English majored postgraduates usually studied English vocabulary autonomously.3. Most vocabulary learning strategies turned to be positively correlated with the learners'vocabulary size except social/affective strategies. Although social/affective strategies do not reveal a significant correlation, the metacognitive strategies are positively and highly correlated with vocabulary test scores. Nevertheless, the metacognitive strategies as a whole were not frequently adopted by either English majored postgraduates or non-English majored postgraduates. Cognitive strategies are also important to vocabulary learning, however, not as significant as metacognitive ones are.According to the above results and analysis, it could be concluded that application of learning strategies do really works and metacognitive strategies is more effective for language learners in their vocabulary acquisition. Thus, this research does have some practical meaning in vocabulary memorization. First, it is better to employ some vocabulary learning strategies while acquire English vocabulary and second, metacognitive is preferred to, that is, learning autonomously. Therefore, this research may be of some value in improving the efficiency of English vocabulary memorization.