An Empirical Study Of Strategies For Memorizing High School English Vocabulary

English vocabulary plays a significant role in English learning and teaching. With thereinforcement of the international cooperation and communication, society has been puttingforward a higher and higher requirement for students’ English learning. However, the currentsituation of the high school students’ memorizing English words is worrying. To make thingsworse, so many English teachers don’t draw much attention to this problem. A lot of highschool students think that it is tough to memorize English words, the inefficiency ofmemorizing English words makes some students lose interest in learning English, and someof them even want to give up their English learning.In some sense, the faculty of memory and memory level of the high school students ison a par with each other. But why most of the students think it is very difficult to memoryEnglish words while others think it is easy to memorize English words? By communicatingwith the students and analyzing their answers to the questionnaires, I learn that the mainreason why many of them don’t remember the English words is that they are short of learningand guidance in memory strategies. They memorize the English words only by rote learning,but they don’t seek effective methods of memorizing the English words, making what theygive is not consistent with what they take. In order to solve the big problem that students can’tremember the English words, I consulted a large number of books about memory methods andmemory strategies and selected several kinds of memory strategies and imparted them to thestudents to settle this hot potato.I base my empirical study on two parallel classes from Shouguang Xiandai High School,and there are50students in each class. I teach the experimental group strategies formemorizing the high school English words while I instruct the control group with thetraditional methods and I don’t teach them the memory strategies. After learning two books, Iwonder whether the students who apply the strategies for memorizing the English words dobetter in remembering English words in the mass than those in the control group and whetherthese memory strategies for remembering the English words can really shorten the time thatthe students spend in memorizing the English words. By analyzing the research data, I find that the scores of the experimental group arenoticeably better than those in the control group. Besides, these memory strategies help thestudents to shorten their time for memorizing the English words. Much to my delight, thestudents in the experimental group are becoming more and more interested in their Englishlearning, and many students say that they have become more confident in their Englishlearning than ever before.The greatest implication of this empirical study is that the strategies for memorizing theEnglish words can really help the students to memorize the words in a stereo and omni-directional way. In vocabulary teaching, teachers should not only help the students toremember the pronunciation, form and meaning of a word, but should also focus on students’abilities for practical application of English vocabulary. Only in this way, can students reallyimprove their English.