A Comparative Study Of English Vocabulary Learning Strategies By High-achieved Students Between Junior And Senior High Schools

For Chinese language learners, vocabulary is a great challenge. All exams, no matter thecollege entrance exam, or Test for English Majors Level Four or Level Eight, or IELTS, TOFEL,require a large amount of vocabulary. Especially for high school students who face stressfullearning tasks and the burden of GaoKao (College entrance examination), how to effectivelyenlarge their vocabulary in limited time is a question yet to be answered. Therefore, the authorreckons that it is completely necessary to investigate the vocabulary learning strategies that themiddle school students use, especially the strategy use of senior and junior high-achievedstudents and the comparison of the strategy use between them. The significance as well as theessential concern of this research lies in exploring the effective strategies that junior and seniorhigh-achieved students shared; and then it is strongly suggested that teachers should teach thosestrategies to English learners with the hope of improving their efficiency and easing theirpressure.There are five chapters in this thesis. Introduction comes to be the first part. The second partis literature review. The third part presents methodology. Data discussion takes the fourth part.The last part belongs to the conclusion. Part one explains the intention to this thesis as well as thehypothesis and significance. The theories that guide this research and the reviews abroad and athome are presented in the literature review part. Part three is one of the most important parts. Inpart three, methodology about objectives, subjects, research tools are listed in order. Theobjective is to study the situation of senior and junior high-achieved students on their vocabularylearning strategy use. The participants come from one senior high school and one junior highschool in Changchun. Research tools include questionnaire, interviews and tests. The datacollected from the above tools will be analyzed with the help of SPSS19.0. The fourth part is aresult discussion part. There will be the discussion of questionnaire data and discussion ofinterview data. The fifth part concludes the major findings of this research according to the datadiscussion in part four. The remaining parts in part five will elaborate on the limitations of thisresearch as well as the implications.The theory of learning-acquisition, affective filter and monitoring are all closely linked tovocabulary learning. This research intend to find the characters of strategy use among junior andsenior high-achieved students, and the similarities as well as differences and put them into thepractical vocabulary teaching. The research has found that both junior and senior high-achieveddo well in using the self-talk strategy to encourage themselves. In addition, they are good at making learning plans and evaluating learning outcomes. In terms of cognitive strategies, thesenior but not the junior high-achieved does better in thinking and understanding the new words.It is believed that those strategies favors vocabulary learning and using and are worthy to beadvocated in English vocabulary teaching.