A Study Into Senior High School Learners’ Vocabulary Learning Strategies

From the point of view of speech production, vocabulary plays a vital important part at the very beginning of human language. As vocabulary is an essential material for language building, it plays a more and more important part in the successful acquisition of a foreign language. Learning strategy is the most decisive one among all the factors which influence language learning in our high schools. Therefore, vocabulary learning has become an important respect of English language learning research.This research is an empirical study of the vocabulary learning strategies of senior high school students. One hundred and twenty students are selected as the subjects of the investigation. Before the investigation, an English vocabulary test is conducted among the120subjects to determine their vocabulary size and differentiate the high-scorers and low-scorers. Then a questionnaire about vocabulary learning strategies is used as instrument to investigate their use of vocabulary-learning strategies. After that, the data are analyzed with the statistic tool---SPSS version11.5(Statistical Package for Social Sciences), arid the results are discussed. First, the research proves that the strategies used most frequently by senior high school students are memory strategies, cognitive strategies. However, meta-cognitive strategies are not used frequently. Second, it is proper for students to take advantage of a variety of strategies. Third, the efficiency of strategies depends on individual learners.The study holds considerable pedagogical implications. As for language learners, it is good to use a variety of learning strategies for the retention of vocabulary. As for language teachers, it is high time that they helped students to form their suitable vocabulary learning strategies instead of leaving word-study to students themselves. It is their duty to provide a wealth of activities to increase the learners’ awareness of various strategies and to improve their ability to employ strategies appropriately and effectively.