A Study Of Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge And Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Non-English Majors

Second language vocabulary acquisition, as an important component in second language acquisition, has been attached much importance in the field recently. More and more studies have realized that vocabulary acquisition is not a "not acquired/acquired" affair. Instead, it is an incremental process in which the knowledge of the target words accumulates gradually. In essence, the depth of vocabulary knowledge, or how well a word is known may determine a learner's vocabulary capacity. Among all the factors that may affect vocabulary acquisition outcomes, the use of vocabulary learning strategy is one of the most important.Under this background, the thesis carried out an empirical study of vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary learning strategies. 255 non-English majors in an independent college took part in the investigation by finishing a test paper adapted from Read's (1998) Word Association Test, and a questionnaire with reference to Gu and Johnson's (1996). On a comprehensive review of previous studies and research gaps, the thesis investigated their overall acquisition of depth of vocabulary knowledge and the overall pattern of English vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies, and further explored the correlation between students' depth of vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary learning strategies. After the data were collected, processed and analyzed with SPSS, the following findings were obtained:Firstly, generally speaking, the depth of vocabulary knowledge of the participants only reaches the passing level, mastering a little more than 60% of the vocabulary knowledge of high frequency words. Most participants' depth of vocabulary knowledge is below the middle level. Correlation analysis exhibits that the two types of vocabulary knowledge (synonym and collocation) correlate with each other significantly and scores of the total vocabulary knowledge are highly related with the two types of vocabulary knowledge.Secondly, most participants hold the belief that words should be learned in context and through use while the belief that words should be memorized is not popular. Most participants believe that learners should not only make efforts to enlarge their vocabulary size but also pay sufficient attention to various aspects of vocabulary knowledge. Generally, they employ a variety of vocabulary learning strategies at metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective dimensions. Cognitive strategies are the most frequently used ones, and social/affective strategies are the least. The most frequently employed vocabulary learning strategies are self-management, dictionary use, note-taking, affective control, selective attention, guessing and memorization, with the popularity in a descending order, while reviewing and testing, plan-making and plan-implementing, learner autonomy and social activities are seldom used.Thirdly, the results indicate that most strategies are significantly correlated with the depth of vocabulary knowledge. All the categories of metacognitive strategies have significant positive correlation with the depth of vocabulary knowledge. At cognitive level, dictionary use strategy, note-taking strategy and guessing strategy have significant positive correlation with the depth of vocabulary knowledge. The subcategories of memorization strategy have no correlation with the depth of vocabulary knowledge except contextualization strategy. Social activities strategy has no correlation with the depth of vocabulary knowledge.Finally, on the basis of the findings, this thesis presents suggestions on how to improve vocabulary knowledge of high frequency words through teaching and learning, and on how to cultivate effective vocabulary knowledge learning strategies. It is hoped that this study can offer some help for the further study.