Survey On Students’ English Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Vocabulary Teaching In Senior Middle Schools

Vocabulary is an important part of language, and senior middle school students have developed certain characteristics of learning habit after several years of English learning. However, the traditional English teaching methods and present learning approaches have hardly achieved effective language learning in senior middle schools. Students often have a hard time in writing as well as in speaking English due to a lack of correct and effective English vocabulary learning strategies (VLS). Vocabulary learning is deemed as the greatest barrier to overall English learning.Currently, most researches on vocabulary learning strategies are conducted at the collegiate level, very few carried out at the middle school level. Exploring effective English vocabulary learning strategies is the best way to improve students’English in middle school education. On the basis of such a background, the paper aims at exploring different vocabulary learning strategies and analyzing which strategies are more beneficial to senior middle school (SMS) students.The paper explores and describes the vocabulary learning strategies utilized by120grade two senior middle school students. The paper is conducted mainly in the form of questionnaire which takes reference from the classification of O’Malley&Chamot’s vocabulary learning strategies. The questionnaire is accompanied with informal interviews of some students and teachers. Analyses are mainly based on the data collected from a study conducted at Juegang Senior Middle School in the questionnaire. The research shows that the students of senior middle school have already got fairly reasonable vocabulary learning beliefs and metacognitive strategies, but there are discrepancies between what they think and what they do. Note-taking and dictionary strategies are the most common ones for all the students at the first encountering of a new word, and this suggests that the learners tend to depend on other means in discovering new words’meaning, either through teachers’explaining or dictionary. Repetition strategies are the mostly used consolidation strategies for both groups of students. This outcome reveals that the learners are opt to use the traditional way of learning Chinese to learn English, but they are supposed to realize the inefficiency of these strategies and that too much time is consumed. From the data in the questionnaire and feedbacks of the interviews, we can conclude that the students eagerly need vocabulary learning strategies training and instructions including teachers’effective teaching of vocabulary. It is obvious from the research that what teachers have done about vocabulary teaching in the classroom is far from enough or effective. The teachers should pay more attention to students’ use of vocabulary learning strategies, and give them necessary instructions on it. They also need to adopt various effective teaching methods to enhance students’ vocabulary learning.As lack of space forbids further developing the topic here, the thesis only deals with English vocabulary learning strategies but lacks thorough analysis of the many factors which influence vocabulary learning for which more efforts are desired for further study.