Changes In College Students’ English Vocabulary Learning Strategies And The Effects On Their Vocabulary Development

Development involves changes. This research focused on college non-English major freshmen’s changes in their English vocabulary learning strategies compared with those used by high school students with the aim to discover the relationship between those changes and their English vocabulary learning achievements. To realize this goal, the current situation of some non-English major freshmen’s English vocabulary learning strategies was also studied.By making a survey, it was found that many non-English major freshmen paid less attention to meta-cognitive strategies and used less cognitive strategies concerning deep information processing, such as mnemonics, application and context strategies. Many of them failed to realize the importance of effective use of social/affective strategies in their vocabulary learning.Through contrastive analyses between senior high school students and college high-achievers and low-achievers respectively, it was found that those college freshmen who had made timely strategy adjustment in their English vocabulary learning after entering college gradually became high-achievers in English vocabulary learning, while, those who failed to make certain adjustment properly finally became low-achievers owing to the increasing demand of vocabulary learning tasks at university and their low efficiency of vocabulary learning strategies.Based on those studies and analyses, small scale strategy training was conducted with some non-English majors and the emphasis was laid on those strategies closely related to vocabulary learning but poorly-used by students so as to help them make better adjustment of their vocabulary learning strategies based on the tasks and characteristics of their college English learning. The training result was positive, which will be of some significance for both teaching and research in the future.