English Vocabulary Learning Beliefs And Strategies Of Students In A Teachers' College

The issue of English vocabulary learning has always been the concern of linguists and English instructors.The recent studies established the framework of vocabulary learning strategies,but they only focused on one or some aspects of them. Based on the classification of vocabulary learning strategies proposed by O'Malley& Chamot and resource strategy recently added,the author carried out a research aiming to investigate teachers college students'vocabulary learning beliefs and strategy use.The study used a quantitative method combined with a qualitative one. The participants in the quantitative part included 45 students in Class 6, Grade 4 from Wuxi Teachers'College. A vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire was used for the data collection.In the qualitative part,the researcher interviewed 4 students including 2 high-scoring students and 2 low-scoring students, trying to triangulate the questionnaire data results and gain some insights into their learning beliefs and their strategy use. By analyzing the collected data and the interview results,the researcher acquire the following findings:1) Most of these teachers college students think that rote rehearsal strategy is not a good way to learn English words. They hold positive attitudes towards the belief that words should be learned and put to use and that words should be learned in context. In spite of this, most of them still use rote rehearsal strategy in practice, and learning new words by reading and activation strategy such as putting the new words to use are not popular with them. The result indicates that the students have changed the traditional belief that the words should be consciously memorized, but they haven't formed efficient vocabulary learning strategies.2) These teachers college students employ various vocabulary learning strategies concerning meta-cognitive, cognitive, social/affective and resource aspects,and they are intermediate strategy users.They do not often use cooperation strategy. They spend little time exchanging ideas about vocabulary learning experiences and discussing problems they encounter in the course of vocabulary study. They use all kinds of resources to learn English vocabulary, such as dictionaries, computers, English software and TVs. The English materials they use mainly come from reference books, TV programs, daily newspapers, library books and the Internet.Based on the findings mentioned above, the study discusses the pedagogical implications, the limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.