Vocational School Students’ EFL Vocabulary Learning Strategy Training: Toward An Integrated Approach

Although, in the recent years, much progress has been made in the training of learning strategies in EFL teaching in China, there is still a lack of effective approaches to the training of vocational school students’vocabulary learning strategies. Meanwhile, the study of EFL learning or EFL vocabulary learning strategies and their training in China and other countries has also made some achievements, but it has often neglected vocational school students and has been short of more integrated approaches. Being aware of the limitations of existing studies, therefore, this thesis focuses on the teaching EFL vocabulary to vocational school students in China, bases itself on more integrated theories and methods of language learning strategies and strategy training, adopts a more comprehensive methodology involving both theoretical and empirical procedures, and designs and verifies a more integrated approach to vocational school students’EFL vocabulary learning strategy training.Firstly, in terms of its theoretical exploration, this thesis incorporates the most salient language or vocabulary learning strategy and strategy training theories and methods available, selects more integrated training goals, contents and manners, and designs an integrated approach to vocational school students’vocabulary learning strategy training. This approach takes vocational school students as its main concern, improving their autonomy and performance in EFL vocabulary learning as its main aim, meta-cognitive, mnemonic, cognitive, and various other strategies as its training contents, discreet and holistic, explicit and implicit, or mainly embedded and sometimes separate instruction as its manner of training.Secondly, in terms of its empirical exploration, this thesis studies the effects of the advanced integrated approach through a quasi-experiment consisting of a pretest, a training period of 20 weeks and a posttest, taking as its subjects of study two classes of Grade 2 students from a vocational school, using EFL vocabulary learning strategy questionnaires and EFL vocabulary proficiency test as its tools of data collection, and SPSS11.0 (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) as its measure of data analysis. Results generated from the quasi-experiment are: (1) Through the integrated approach to vocational school students’EFL vocabulary learning strategy training, the students have successfully mastered the relevant EFL vocabulary learning strategies, and evidently increased their autonomy in EFL vocabulary learning. (2) The students’performance in EFL vocabulary learning has been improved evidently due to their mastery of the relevant strategies.This study is practically significant as it has advanced an integrated approach to vocational school students’EFL vocabulary learning strategy training and has verified its effectiveness. It is also theoretically meaningful as it has made up for some of the limitations in learning strategy training research such as its negligence of vocational school students and its lack of adequate integrity.