Survey Of The Usage Of English Words Learning Strategies By The Senior High School Students

Words are the construction materials of a language. Without words, there is no language itself. Vocabulary learning appears more and more important to language study. This research investigates the using and the overall trend of vocabulary learning strategies of senior high school students by questionnaires and interviews. The participants are all the students of about 2400 of a certain senior high school in Jilin Province.The results of the statistics from the investigation to learn the general situation of the use of vocabulary learning strategies are inputted into computer and SPSS10.0 statistical analysis software is used to analyze them. Descriptive statistics is obtained to see the overall patterns of vocabulary teaming strategies used by the students, then the effect of vocabulary strategies on word studying is discussed in the paper. The major findings are concluded as follows:(1) the use rate of vocabulary strategies and the use rate of metacognitive strategies are relatively high (the average number is above 3), while the use of social/ affection strategies is relatively low. The ranking according to use rate from high to low is as follows: pronunciation > the use of background knowledge > taking notes > oral repetition > choosing attention. The strategies of new words book, auditory coding, figure and visual coding, meaning coding, cooperation and self-encouragement is relatively the lowest.(2) Except the use of auditory coding, meaning coding and self-encouragement, the girls use more strategies than the boys in the other 19 strategies. There are six strategies the use of which exist apparent difference between boys and girls.(3) The group of excellent learners uses more vocabulary strategies than the group of poor learners. The excellent learners use strategies more often, especially in metacognitive strategies.The results of the investigation have some help on vocabulary learning as well as vocabulary teaching. On one hand, for the learners, the using of a series of vocabulary strategies has an active effect on vocabulary memorizing. That's to say, first, learners should plan and manage the process of memory. Second, learners should not only work hard in vocabulary memorizing, but also work technically. One can only get the best result with the complement of some strategies. Third, learners should remember words by using them and use memory strategies to help get a better result. On the other hand, teachers shouldn't leave the task of remembering words to learners completely and make the process a spontaneous one. Teachers should help students to use a variety of vocabulary strategies by combining teaching contents with vocabulary learning in order to help them form a set of vocabulary strategies and use them to obtain the goal of vocabulary learning.