An Empirical Study Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies In Junior Middle School

The thesis reports a survey of vocabulary learning strategies used by junior three students in four junior schools in Jintan, Jiangsu Province. It explores the vocabulary learning strategies used by the junior three students and identifies the most/least frequently used strategies, and finds out why they favor certain strategies over others. Eventually, the study aims at providing profiles for those high school teachers who are interested in strategy training.A vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire consisting forty-six questions and semi-structured interview are the basic instruments in the study. The questionnaire comes from that of Schmitt's (1997) and Kudo's (1999) with some adaptations. The data are analyzed with the help of SPSS according to Schmitt's (1997) taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategies.The results show that the level of vocabulary strategy use by sampled students is only medium, averaging 2.86. Among the four categories investigated, cognitive strategies are the most frequently used, followed by social strategies, metacognitive strategies, and memory strategies. Five individual vocabulary learning strategies are reported as the most frequently used ones, and eleven are reported as the least frequently used ones. The junior students favor those cognitively shallow strategies, and they often employ certain for convenience. The results may shed some light on the instruction and further studies in this field.After the quantitative analysis, a semi-structured interview is conducted to 20 students of the subjects in order to find out detailed information about the use of the sampled students.In the end, based on the research findings, questions for future researches are proposed.