An Empirical Study On English Vocabulary Memory Strategy Of Senior One Students

In the field of language acquisition, vocabulary has always been a neglected aspect as well as language teaching. However, as the basis of all language skills, vocabulary is of great importance to language learners. Nowadays, the drawback of traditional English teaching patterns has added to the difficulties of students' vocabulary memorizing, which has a bad effect on their English learning. In order to ease the burden of learning and to enhance the quality education, we have to sum up effective memory strategies with the help of which the present condition of repeated rote memorizing and repeated forgetting can be changed. With the development of cognitive psychology, the research into the effectiveness of vocabulary memory strategies has received increasing attention. Although the relevant theories and researches have been blossoming, few are involved in high schools. Moreover, the new curriculum has put forward more demanding tasks of vocabulary knowledge for high school students. Based on the careful literature review of various theories and researches from famous scholars, this research has classified different specific vocabulary memory strategies, investigated the present conditions of vocabulary knowledge and memory strategies using in high schools, and particularly focused on the correlation between vocabulary knowledge and memory strategies. The findings are as follows:(1) The receptive vocabulary knowledge of Senior One students has nearly reached the standard of new curriculum, but the productive vocabulary knowledge is far from being satisfactory.(2) In the process of vocabulary memorization, repetition strategy, chunk strategy and spelling strategy are frequently used ,while the key-word strategy is least employed. Other strategies that are not always employed are word-list strategy application strategy and context strategy. As we can see, repetition strategy is popular although it is mechanical, so rote-learning still plays an important role in vocabulary memorizing. High school students are lacking in scientific strategy implying. However, the frequent use of meta-memorization strategy shows a good trend in their learning.(3) As to the relationship between memory strategies and vocabulary knowledge, , the strategies from the most relevant to the least are as follows: application . strategy, association strategy, chunk strategy, analyzing strategy, context strategy, repetition strategy and meta-memorization strategy. Among them, the repetition strategy has a negative correlation with vocabulary knowledge.