An Investigation Into Non-English Major Students' Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Their Productive Vocabulary Knowledge

Vocabulary learning is of vital importance in language learning. Vocabulary learning strategy has drawn attention of many researchers and foreign language teachers, plenty of researches have proved that effective vocabulary learning strategies can facilitate foreign language learning. Many problems have emerged in college non-English majors'vocabulary learning, such as small vocabulary size, the students'receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary knowledge do not develop in a balanced way and their productive vocabulary size lags far behind the receptive vocabulary size. A lot of researches have been focused on receptive vocabulary and vocabulary learning strategies and great achievements have been made. But few researches have been done on productive vocabulary and correlations between productive vocabulary and vocabulary learning strategy.This study is intended to examine the overall pattern of VLS (vocabulary learning strategy) of the non-English majors, the general state of non-English majors'receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge (size), and the correlation between the use of VLS and the non-English majors'productive vocabulary knowledge. The participants are 113 college non-English majors from Jiangxi Normal University. The questionnaire adopted in the present study is from Gu & Johnson's (1996). The two Vocabulary Level Tests were administered by using Nation's (1990:261) Vocabulary Levels Test and Nation's (2001:425) The Productive Levels Test. The statistical software SPSS 15.0 for Windows is used to analyze the data. The results of this study show that:1. The overall frequency of the participants'vocabulary learning strategies is not high. Cognitive strategies are the most frequently used, followed by metacognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. Dictionary strategies, Guessing strategies, Association strategies, Contextualization strategies, Affective control strategies, Note-taking strategies, Selective attention strategies, Repetition strategies, Activation strategies are frequently used by the participants. Grouping strategies, Self-initiation strategies, Imagery strategies, Word-structure strategies, Using word lists strategies, Planning strategies and Social activitiy strategies are occasionally used by the students.2. Generally, the students'RV and PV size are not large. The students'productive knowledge lags far behind their receptive knowledge. There is a significant difference between receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge.3. The correlation analysis shows that metacogntive strategies, Guessing strategies, Dictionary strategies, Note-taking strategies, Association strategies,, Word-structure strategies, Grouping strategies, Activation strategies, Affective control strategies are all significantly correlated with the PLT scores; while Using word lists, Repetition strategies, Imagery strategies and Social activity strategies are found to have no significant correlation with the productive learning achievements.The study has implications for vocabulary learning and teaching practice, and in the end of the thesis, some tentative suggestions are provided for future studies on the basis of the limitations of the present study.