Learning Vocabulary Through Senior English Reading Class: An Empirical Study Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Training

With the trend of globalization and China's successful entrance into the WTO as well as the effect of the coming Olympic Games, the significant role of English has become all the more self-evident. Vocabulary is one of the three major components of English language knowledge, and it is the foundation of all English language skills as well as an essential component for language building, so vocabulary plays a crucial role in foreign language instruction and is important to the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.To enhance more effective and efficient English vocabulary instruction, it is essential to know what learners actually do with vocabulary in their English learning process. In other words, to have a thorough understanding of the vocabulary learning strategies they employ will shed valuable light on how to improve English vocabulary teaching in class and promote English vocabulary learning as well.Unfortunately, vocabulary learning is generally considered time-consuming and inefficient in high schools; both teachers and students spend enormous amounts of time and energy in vocabulary teaching and learning, but little is rewarded. Quite a lot of students feel it hard to meet the requirement for vocabulary set in the newly-issued The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools (Trial Edition) (2003) because many high schools still adopt large class learning and the students just read after the teacher mechanically in class, memorize the vocabulary in isolation after class and immediately turn to dictionary whenever meeting new words, etc. Of course the general efficiency of English learning cannot satisfy the needs of newly-issued The National English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools. However, vocabulary learning strategies can solve this problem by improving the learning efficiency. So it is necessary to explore what learning strategies they actually apply in their vocabulary learning process and induct students to employ vocabulary learning strategies appropriately. However, most of the related studies are conducted among western learners, while few deal with the Chinese learners, who comprise most of the foreign language learners in the world. In China, the previous related studies, especially vocabulary learning are limited to college students, few researches have been undertaken among middle school students, especially on senior high school students' vocabulary learning strategies.On consideration of these factors and reading is one of the most important channels for vocabulary input in most Chinese classrooms as vocabulary learned through reading class account for a large proportion of anyone's vocabulary size, this paper attempts to investigate vocabulary learning strategies employed by the students learning English in senior one at a high school and explore the effect of training of certain vocabulary learning strategies in reading class.The experiment is undertaken in two classes chosen from Senior Grade One of Qijiang High School during three months. The experimental class and the control class are in the charge of the same English teacher and their average English levels are almost the same. During the experiment, the researcher arranges questionnaires, observation, interview, pre-tests and post-tests to conduct the research. By carefully comparing and analyzing the data collected from the experiment and the figures of the pre-tests and post-tests, the researcher gets the conclusion that the employment of senior high school students' vocabulary learning strategies is in the initial stage and their awareness still needs improving. The experiment also shows that vocabulary learning strategies training in the reading class can indeed be of benefit to students and improve their vocabulary and reading ability. Learning vocabulary through reading class is a very effective way to improve English. However, it is affected by many factors and due to the constraints of time, energy and research environment, there are still some limitations in the present research. This paper mainly attempts to arouse more linguists, researchers and practitioners' interest in the study of vocabulary learning through reading class so that more instructions and better reading materials for L2 English learners at different levels could be provided. In this way students would feel it enjoyable to learn vocabulary and the overall efficiency in English language learning and teaching would be improved.