Developing English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Junior High School Students

The status and significance of vocabulary can be fully conveyed in the following quotation "Learners feel that many of their difficulties in both receptive and productive language use result from an inadequate vocabulary" (Nation,2004, p.2). The National English Curriculum (2001, p.20) stipulates that if they reach the vocabulary objective of the fifth grade, junior high school students should be able to use 1500 to 1600 English words and 200 to 300 idioms or set phrases. Vocabulary is a very important part of English knowledge. However, many students have difficulty in learning vocabulary, especially for beginners such as junior high school students of Grade Seven. In order to make vocabulary learning easier, it is essential to equip the students with vocabulary learning strategies.There are plenty of researchers exploring vocabulary learning strategies based on the researches into language learning strategies. Stoffer (1995), Schmitt (2002), Gu and Johnson (1996) are among the foreign researchers who have made great contributions to the classifications of vocabulary learning strategies. In China, fruitful results have also been achieved. The large number of researches on vocabulary learning strategies at home and abroad promotes the increasing attention to vocabulary learning strategy training. Among the researches, three limitations are noticeable:first, the research subjects are mainly college students as well as senior high school students, but few are junior high school students; second, these existing strategy trainings mainly focus on one or two kind of language learning strategies in general, but few explore the strategy training of language knowledge such as vocabulary; third, most of the researches are separate one-time training which is not integrated into the classroom teaching, and it is not easy to find vocabulary learning strategy training based on textbooks.In terms of the above mentioned limitations of the existing researches as well as the significance of vocabulary learning strategies, the present thesis puts forward an experimental study to develop English vocabulary learning strategies of junior high school students based on Go for it! aiming to explore a model of vocabulary learning strategy training for junior high school students based on the textbook. This study answers two questions:Question 1:Does the vocabulary learning strategy training for junior high school students make vocabulary learning easier? Question 2:Does the vocabulary learning strategy training for junior high school students increase the use frequency of vocabulary learning strategies? The strategies to be trained in this study include meta-cognitive strategies such as self-evaluation and self-monitoring; cognitive strategies like analyzing contrastively and reasoning deductively; memory strategies such as grouping, semantic mapping, and using the phonetic symbols; resourcing strategies as using the dictionary or Internet, learning vocabulary from English songs and daily life etc.The subjects of the study are 55 junior high school students of Grade Seven in High School Affiliated to Southwest University. And the experiment lasts for 10 weeks. The research adopts mixed methods. The pre-test uses questionnaires and interviews to obtain subjects’information before the training. After the ten-week-long vocabulary learning strategy training, the post-test employs questionnaires to collect data and then compares with the pre-test data. Besides that, the post-test interviews obtain students’feedback on the training.The findings are that the training increases the use frequency of vocabulary learning strategies and it is also proved to help students learn vocabulary more effectively. The implications of the study are that the current use frequency of vocabulary learning strategies of the junior high school students is at medium level. And through proper training based on the textbook, their use frequency level of vocabulary learning strategy can be improved, which proves that the model of vocabulary learning strategy training based on Go for it! is feasible and effective.The study is constrained by limited time, limited content, a comparatively small sample size, and limited research methods. For further research, a more comprehensive and long-term vocabulary learning strategy training program can be designed based on the whole series of textbooks. And to make the research more persuasive and valid, more research methods and more subjects are needed in the further study.