A Study On Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Secondary Vocational School Students

For a long time, vocabulary acquisition has been considered as one of the mostconcerned issues to the EFL/L2 learners, because vocabulary competence is at theheart of communicative competence, and the size of vocabulary can usually reflectone's language achievement. Among the many factors which influence the learner'slanguage learning, vocabulary learning strategies proved to be the most importantfactor that has great influence on language learning outcomes. What we focus on inthis thesis is to explore the overall pattern of English vocabulary learning strategiesemployed by secondary vocational school students.This study aims at surveying learners' beliefs and strategies of vocabularylearning, and specifically, it is designed to seek the overall pattern of Englishvocabulary learning strategies employed by secondary vocational school students, todiscuss the similarities and differences in the use of English vocabulary learningstrategies between good learners and less successful learners, and to analyze thecorrelation between the students' using of vocabulary learning strategies and theirvocabulary acquisition. Participants were 158 students from three different vocationalschools in Qingdao, Shandong Province. The questionnaire (VLQ Version 3) of Gu and Johnson's (1996) was used in thisstudy to investigate students' beliefs about vocabulary learning and their vocabularylearning strategies. It contains three sections: Section 1 involves an instruction on thequestionnaire;Section 2 includes 17 statements representing 3 kinds of vocabularylearning beliefs: Vocabulary should be memorized;Vocabulary should be picked upnaturally;and Vocabulary should be studied and used. Section 3 constitutes the mainbody of the questionnaire that involves various English vocabulary learning strategies.According to Gu and Johnson's classification, it contains 91 English vocabularylearning behaviors divided into two major parts: Meta-cognitive Regulation andCognitive Strategies. The data were collected and processed with SPSS, and thequantitative analysis indicates that:(1) The participants do employ a large variety of different vocabulary learningstrategies in their English vocabulary learning process, and also they have their ownfavorite strategies.(2) The most frequently employed English vocabulary learning strategies ranked asdictionary use for comprehension, extended dictionary use, self-initiation, widercontext guessing and looking-up strategies. Generally speaking, the students werefairly mature learners in terms of using dictionary and guessing strategies. On theother hand, they were fairly passive in using repetition, imagery and word liststrategies. Therefore, a systematic mastery of vocabulary learning strategies needs tobe cultivated.(3) More successful learners prefer dictionary use for comprehension strategies, theircontextualization memorization strategies and activation strategies were significantlydifferent from those of less successful learners. They held much less MemorizationBelief than less successful learners, too. Special attention should be paid to theinstruction in vocabulary learning strategies to less successful learners.(4) For most of the secondary vocational school students, their English foundation isrelatively poor, and they don't obtain a large size of vocabulary. Besides, the SVSSare lack of learner autonomy and their ability of self-monitoring is lower. Therefore,some strategies like contextualization memorization strategies can hardly be carriedout. This needs the teacher's long-term enlightenment and training.The insights gained from this study are that teachers should provide students withsystematic English vocabulary learning strategies instruction, both explicitly andimplicitly , and help them to establish the consciousness of English vocabularylearning through a wide range of strategies. Therefore, teachers should put moreemphasis on strategy training and learner training.