Improving Junior Middle School Students' Vocabulary Comprehension Through Vocabulary Learning Strategies Training

Vocabulary is the basic unit in the language. In communication, it is essential for transferring information, and in language learning, it plays an important role in improving students'language ability. Acquisition of the vocabulary easily wipes off the biggest obstacle in listening, speaking, reading and writing, which all depend on vocabulary largely. However, many students feel vocabulary learning is the most difficult task in students' study. It is hard to learn and memorize vocabulary. They forget vocabulary quickly and will not test well. Some students lose English learning interest and confidence, and some even give up the subject. In order to help the students out of this difficult situation, the author argues that it is necessary to train the students to master some vocabulary learning strategies.This study is on junior middle school students. The purpose of the study is to improve junior middle school students'vocabulary comprehension and help them develop relatively reasonable beliefs on vocabulary learning through vocabulary learning strategies training. The subjects of the study are junior middle school students in Grade One from No. 34 Middle School in Huhhot. They are from two classes. One class is randomly assigned as the experimental class, and the other as the control class. Each class has 56 students. The experimental class is taught by the author with vocabulary learning strategies approach, while the control class is taught with the traditional pedagogy. The experiment lasted 16 weeks. Both classes finished the pre-test and the experimental class filled out the questionnaire before the training and after 16 weeks'vocabulary learning strategies training, both classes finished the post-test and the experimental class filled out the same questionnaire. Both tests consist of five parts and they are at the same level of difficulty. The vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire is used to ascertain students'beliefs about vocabulary learning and their vocabulary learning strategies before and after vocabulary learning strategies training. After that, the statistic tool----SPSS version 13.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was used to analyze the data, and the results were discussed according to the statistics.The results of the study speak in favor of the strategies training. The vocabulary learning strategies training has a positive effect on improving the students'vocabulary learning. The vocabulary learning strategies training program helps enhance their strategy consciousness and frequency of strategy use. It can also help improve the students'vocabulary comprehension.The study has provided positive implications for classroom teaching in vocabulary, and more attention is to be called on for studies.