A Survey Study On English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Used By High School Students

Vocabulary is one of the most basic elements of a language. A foreign language learner often tries to find efficient ways of learning vocabulary of a target language. Vocabulary strategies have been studied for decades, with focus either on the overall pattern of vocabulary learning strategy use or on the effectiveness of certain strategies.The present study was a survey study which attempted to explore the overall pattern of English vocabulary learning strategies used by high school students in Handan, Hebei province and their beliefs concerning vocabulary learning. The major goal of this study was to gain a general profile of English vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies adopted by Chinese high school students.A questionnaire, adapted from Gu and Johnson (1996), was administered to 315 high school students from three schools. Students' vocabulary learning strategies were investigated at metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective levels. By using SPSS, the analyses of the data revealed the following findings:(1) The analysis of the research data suggests that most high school students tend to view vocabulary learning as a kind of monotonous, mechanical task from which they derive little pleasure and sense of success.(2) The research results indicate that Chinese high school EFL learners tend to employ a variety of vocabulary learning strategies. However, among the three broad categories of vocabulary learning strategies, cognitive strategies seem to be the most frequently used, whereas social/affective strategies seem to be the least frequently used. Metacognitive strategies fall in between.(3) The T-test results suggest that Chinese students in junior and senior high schools share both similarities and differences in how and to what extent they used vocabulary learning strategies. Both groups of investigated students used some similar vocabulary-learning strategies, especially cognitive strategies such as repetition, association, grouping and practicing. And both groups of students used social/affective vocabulary learning strategies less frequently such as communicating with other people, and they seldom used learner autonomy or self-monitoring strategies at metacognitive level. However, compared with junior high school students, senior high school students reported to have employed more metacognitive strategies such as planning and selective-attention and cognitive strategies such as contextualization, guessing, dictionary use and note-taking.This paper analyzes these findings respectively, and suggests some pedagogical implications of the research.