The Investigation On Senior High School Students' English Vocabulary Learning Strategies

As Linguist M. McCarthy (1990) points out:"No matter how good one's grammar is and how beautiful one's pronunciation is, but if one has no adequate vocabulary to express one's own feelings or to understand others'opinions, one still cannot communicate with others in this language". Obviously, vocabulary is the most important one of the three major components (grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary) of a language, for it is the basis of any kind of communication. Since the 1970's, the researches on vocabulary strategies have been emphasized both at home and abroad. However, in China, only few researches into vocabulary strategies learning focused on the senior high school students, and these researches are just at the basic level, as Wen (2003) indicates.The new National Curriculum Standards for the English Language Teaching (2003.7) have a new demand for the number of vocabulary:senior students are required to master at least 3000 words in addition to a quantity of useful expressions and vocabulary learning strategies. However, vocabulary learning is the most difficult task for senior high school students. Therefore, it is important for teachers to study vocabulary learning strategies and improve the teaching of vocabulary learning strategies.Learners'vocabulary learning strategies refer to specific approaches, methods, behaviors, steps, or techniques that the learners (often intentionally) used to improve their progress in acquiring the target language. The thesis refers to the theory of O'Malley & Chamot (1990): Vocabulary learning strategies consist of meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, social/affection strategies. This thesis mainly focuses on English vocabulary learning strategies of senior 2 school students in Wenzhou by questionnaire and interview in order to discover the correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and academic achievements in English learning. Besides, based on this research and many years'teaching experience, the writer intends to find out a set of teaching methods of vocabulary learning strategies.The major findings can be summarized as follows:1) The senior school students generally have a low understanding of English vocabulary learning strategies, especially the meta-cognitive strategies, the cognitive strategies and the social/affection strategies.2) There exists a correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and academic achievements in English learning. High-strategy learners obviously have a larger English vocabulary than low-strategy learners do.The thesis has also emphasized the teachers'role in strategy training and put forward some appropriate vocabulary learning strategies for present senior high school students. In addition, it has offered some advice for English vocabulary teaching and learning to improve the efficiency of English teaching and learning.