A Study Of Vocabulary Strategies Use By International Chinese Learners In China And Their Correlation To Vocabulary Level

As the foundation of various language learning activities, vocabulary is one of the significant factors of language which reflects different aspects of language. However, vocabulary research has been neglected for a long time in language field. Since1980s, more and more studies on vocabulary acquisition have been carried out. A number of studies have been developed in this field both at home and abroad. In spite of those achievements, there is still lack of investigation into vocabulary learning strategies, especially on the Chinese vocabulary learning strategies of international students. Chinese, as a very old and traditional language, is enjoying high popularity with numerous students from many countries and nations nowadays. Chinese vocabulary is one of the most urge problems which need to be solved for those foreign students. Therefore, the problems on vocabulary learning strategies of international students is worthy of analyzing and discussing. Based on the learning strategies theory of O’Malley&Chamot (1990), Gu&Johnson (1996) and Schimitt (1997), this paper divides the vocabulary learning strategies into four major dimensions, that is, meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, memory strategies and social/affective strategies. Quantitative method, questionnaire and vocabulary proficiency test are adopted to investigate the vocabulary learning strategies of international students in this study. The software SPSS17.0and Excel2007are used as the tool of data analysis. Descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation are computed with the target samples.Through the quantitative analysis, the main findings are listed as follows:1) All of the strategies are employed by international students at a moderate frequency. Memory strategies rank the highest and social strategies the least.2) International students tend to choose comparatively shallow strategies like repetition and mother tongue. But deep strategies, like grouping, which require more efforts and time for information analysis and integration, are not frequently utilized by them.3) International students do not like to employ social/affective strategies frequently, indicating they prefer to learn vocabulary by themselves.4) Vocabulary proficiency of international students is positively correlated with their memory and cognitive strategies use. But meta-cognitive strategies have a low correlation and social/affective strategies have little correlation.This paper consists of five parts. Chapter One introduces the research background, purpose, significance and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two discusses the related concepts and also presents some previous researches on vocabulary strategies. Chapter Three focuses on the study design, including questionnaire design, participants and instruments of the study. Chapter Four mainly discusses the results of data analysis. The last chapter draws a conclusion of the investigation and the implementations of the findings. The limitations of the study and the suggestions for further study are presented as well.