A Comparative Study Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Successful And Unsuccessful English Learners In Senior High Schools

In China, English is learned as a foreign language. Middle school stage is thebest time to train learners’ listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities.Vocabulary is the foundation of those abilities.“English curriculum standards” hasever made a request that high school students should be able to master3000wordsand300-400collocations. Lacking in real language environment, English vocabularystrategy training is an important method to improve students’ vocabulary learning.Once the problems in vocabulary learning are solved, students can learn English muchmore easily.Vocabulary learning is a difficult problem for most of the high school students.Plenty of famous researchers have explored vocabulary learning strategies and madegreat contributions to the study of vocabulary learning strategies. Vocabularystrategies can be classified into three categories: cognitive strategy, metacognitivestrategy and social/emotion strategy. All of them play an important part in improvingstudents’ autonomous learning ability which is the most important purpose of middleschool English teaching, so it is of great importance to study the English Vocabularylearning strategies.Most of the researches focus on language learning strategies in general, but fewexplore the learning strategies of language knowledge such as vocabulary, especiallythe difference between successful and unsuccessful students. The present thesis makesa comparative study between successful and unsuccessful students, aiming to find thedifference between the two groups with different learning bases in vocabularylearning strategies so that we can offer the teacher suggestions of how to train theirvocabulary learning strategies.Through research, this paper mainly answers the following four questions:(1)what kinds of vocabulary learning strategies do successful students tend to choose?(2)What kinds of vocabulary learning strategies do unsuccessful students tend tochoose?(3)Whether the different English foundation of the successful and unsuccessful students can affect their choice of the vocabulary learning strategies?(4)How does the teacher choose vocabulary learning strategy training method accordingto students’ different English levels?These subjects are120students of Grade1from The High School Attached toShandong Normal University. Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, thefollowing conclusions are drawn:1. the students mainly use cognitive strategy,self-control strategy, resource strategy and communicative strategy, which havecertain effect on English vocabulary learning;2. the most popular strategy amonghigh school students is cognitive strategy, followed by the resource strategy andself-control strategy and communicative strategy is the least popular one.3. Thesuccessful students are very different from unsuccessful students in self-controlstrategy and resource strategy, proving that the English vocabulary learning strategiesare positively related to the English level.4. The English and Chinese levels arepositively related to English vocabulary learning strategies.5. The time spent onEnglish learning has little influence on English learning strategies, but the self-controlstrategy in English language learning strategies has a direct influence on the time oflearning English.In conclusion, it can be seen that the students’ use of English vocabulary learningstrategies is still unsatisfactory. Although the successful students’ usage of vocabularylearning strategies is better than that of the unsuccessful students, they can not make agood use of those strategies to promote their English learning. The successful studentsuse self-control strategy and resource strategy better than the unsuccessful students,suggesting that English foundations have certain effects on the use of vocabularylearning strategies; at the same time, both successful and unsuccessful students needto further strengthen the use of communicative strategy. Therefore, the teacher shouldpay more attention to communicative strategy to improve student’ Englishproficiency.The study is restricted by limited time, limited content, a comparatively smallsample size and limited research methods. And to make the research more persuasiveand valid, more research methods and more subjects are needed in further study.IV...