A Research On Improving Junior High School EFL Learners' Vocabulary By Training Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Many scholars in the West and in China studied into Learning Strategies and Vocabulary Learning Strategies(VLS) in the recent thirty years.From the researches being carried out in the West,we can see that almost all the participants learn Indo-European language.Learning methods are usually affected by social background and language learning conditions.In China,we know that the studies are mostly concerned with students in some universities and colleges.Up to now,few of the researches have been done on English Vocabulary Learning Strategies and the effect of English Vocabulary Learning Strategies training on the students in the middle school,especailly senior high school.University or college students have a much better command of English knowledge than those in middle schools.Do the students in the senior high school employ the same Vocabulary Learning Strategie as the ones in the university or college? Do the English Vocabulary Learning Strategies benefit the senior high school students as effectively as the college students?This thesis attempts to explore English Vocabulary Learning Strategies used by some Chinese Senior High EFL students,relationship between certain types of Vocabulary Learning Strategies use and vocabulary size scores and to what extent English Vocabulary Learning Strategie straining will affect students' test scores in the middle school.A questionnair and two vocabulary size tests are administered to 86 middle school students from Nanzhao No.1 Senior High School in the study.In the questionnair the author investigated the students' VLA at metacognitive,cognitive and social/affective levels.By using SPSS,the analysis and conclusion of the data are as follows:1.The middle school students employ a wide range of strategies.Among the three dimensions of Learning Strategies,Cognitive Strategies are most frequently used,followed by Metacognitive Strategies and Social/Affective Strategies.All the Cognitive Strategies except Rote learning,Dictionary use and Note-taking are infrequently used.In the four strategies under Metacognitive Strategies,Selective attention is the most frequently used strategy.While under Cognitive Strategies the most frequently used strategy is Rote learning, the least frequently used strategy is Imagery. 2.This study proves that VLS correlate strongly with the vocabulary test scores.The statistical analysis shows that all the Metacognitive Strategies correlate positively with vovabulary size.Under Cognitive Strategies,all the strategies,with the exception of Rote learning,Imagery and Association are positively correlated with vocabulary size scores.Of the Cognitive Strategies,the use of a dictionary is proved to be the most effective one.The result also turns out that Guessing is the second highly related to vocabulary size.3.VLA training acts an important role on the vocabulary size scores.The beliefs about vocabulary learning after the VLS training have changed,that is to say,the students are more confident in their vocabulary learning.The mean scores of the VLS employed by the students before and after the VLS training are different.We find that after VLS training Cognitive Strategies are still the most frequently used,followed by Metacognitive Strategies, Social/Affective Strategies.In the four strategies under Metacognitive Strategies,Selective attention is still the most frequently used strategy.While Under Cognitive Strategies the most frequently used one is Guessing,the least frequently used one is Activation.According to the compared information about categories before and after VLA training,we can conclude that VLA training has strong effects on the Vocabulary Learning Strategies used by the students. Almost all the mean scores of each category of strategies have increased except Rote learning and Dictionary use.That is to say,the VLS used by the students can be trained.In fact,good results have been achieved.The students applied more and more Learning Strategies in their vocabulary learning.In addition,the mean scores of vocabulary test after the VLS training are highly than before.It indicates that the Vocabulary Learning Strategies training has a positive effect on the students'vocabulary test scores,although other factors should also be taken into consideration,especially we should consider the fact that without the VLS training the students'vocabulary will grow after learning for a period of fourteen weeks.