Senior High School Students' Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Their Relation To Vocabulary Learning Achievement

Vocabulary is central to language and plays a role of critical importance in learners' acquisition of certain languages.However, although senior high school students spend a great deal of time memorizing vocabulary, their vocabulary is far from being satisfactory.How to learn and master vocabulary effectively has become a problem of great urgence for senior high school students.I have consulted the related studies and documents at great length and found that there have existed quite a few studies in the past over twenty years that throw insights into vocabulary learning strategies, the publication of empirical research conducted to investigate the vocabulary learning strategies possessed by Chinese senior high school students is nearly nil. Therefore, I devise a questionnaire and a vocabulary test to investigate their vocabulary strategy use and vocabulary learning achievements respectively.With the help of the software SPSS12.0, this essay explores the pattern of strategies they use and the differences between successful and unsuccessful learners in their strategy use. Then it examines the relationship between their vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary learning achievement. The results show: 1. They tend to adopt a variety of relatively simple strategies; 2. There exists a certain correlation between some vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary learning achievement,negatively(eg:repetition) or positively (eg:guessing); 3. Successful learners and unsuccessful learners are significantly differentiated from each other in their employment of vocabulary learning strategies.Finally, two suggestions are put forward: 1. Students may as well learn and use a variety of strategies which are suitable for them in vocabulary building process and form a good vocabulary learning habit; 2. Teachers should be aware that vocabulary teaching does not simply mean explaining the meaning and use of individual words in detail. It also includes providing these senior high school students with guidance to effectively master as well as employ various vocabulary learning strategies in order to improve their learning efficiency.