An Empirical Study On Developing Senior High School Students’ English Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Their Vocabulary Growth

It goes without saying that vocabulary is an indispensable part of languagelearning; regardless of learners’ learning objectives, it always is one of theparamount factors that should be brought into the learning schedule. However, thetraditional vocabulary teaching is proved to be both time-consuming andinefficient, which has a great impact on learners’ learning strategies and theirgrowth of vocabulary. Therefore, we can often hear students complaining that theteacher is incapable of imparting effective ways of memorizing vocabularies in theclassroom, which to some extent, affects their enthusiasm for learning English.In learning English vocabulary, students would adopt different vocabularylearning strategies, after surveying the status of students’ vocabulary learningstrategies in Grade12, the author finds that taking notes, guessing and repetitionare three most frequently used learning strategies for students to memorize words.The author believes that the English vocabulary learning should not only stay onthe form, spelling and the meaning of words, but should take lexical chunks as thebreakthrough, find potential connection between words, phrases and collocationsso as to practice and cultivate the chunking ability of students, and throughcontinuous pragmatic use and exploration of the vocabulary to improve thelanguage pragmatic ability and further enhance the growth of the Englishvocabulary.This paper tries to begin its analysis from the perspective of LexicalApproach, after illustrating the problems and predicaments in current senior highschool’s English vocabulary teaching, the author brings the Lexical Approach intothe classroom, and takes a total of114students from Class1and2of Senior2inGanzhou No.1High School of Jiangxi Province as the experimental subjects for asix-month experiment. Class1is experiment group while Class2is control group,in Class1, the author adopts Lexical Approach in the process of vocabularyteaching, Class2, on the other hand, are taught with normal teaching methods,over six-month period experiment, the author finds that the vocabulary learningstrategies of classification, guessing and contextualization of experimented groupare better improved than those of controlling group, and the vocabulary is also significantly increased compared with that of controlling group, meanwhile femalestudents, compared with male counterparts, have a more frequent use ofvocabulary learning strategies.Theoretically, the study, from the perspective of Lexical Approach, furtherpractices its impact on students’ vocabulary learning strategies and provided newdata and supplementary evidence to the relationship between the use of vocabularylearning strategies and vocabulary teaching, at the same time, the paper alsoprovides a practical support for the feasibility of Lexical Approach in thevocabulary teaching of the senior high school English textbook of Renmin version.Throughout the half-year experiment, the author believes in addition to asking thestudents to find out the lexical chunks in the textbook, the teacher should teachthem to use those vocabularies in the real contextualized situations, which in turnwill enhance the overall level of students’ vocabulary knowledge and languagecompetence.