A Study On The Relationship Among Thinking Styles, Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Vocabulary Proficiency

Learners with equal abilities are likely to have greatly different performances inlearning. Many studies have been carried out to address the phenomenon, andindividual differences in thinking styles (TS), among other things, have beenidentified to an important factor, predicting learners’ academic achievements to someextent (Zhang,2001). According to Sternberg (1988), TS refer to people’s preferredways of using abilities. Thus, learners may show varied performance when applyingdifferent thinking styles.Vocabulary has been proved to be crucial to second language acquisition. Therehave been a myriad of studies in recent years on the relationship between Englishvocabulary learning strategy (VLS) and English vocabulary proficiency (VP). Thesestudies revealed that that VLS might greatly influence VP (e.g., Ma Guanghui,1997;Chen Bei,2008; Zhang Xiaocai,2008), and that VP might differ among those whoemployed similar VLS. However, no study to date has attempted to further explorethe possible causes.This study aims at investigating the relationship among learners’ TS, VLS andVP within the theoretical frameworks of the TS and VLS. It was carried out inZhengzhou University with117sophomores as participants. The instruments used tocollect date include TS inventory (TSI), a VLS questionnaire and a vocabularyproficiency test. The TSI was designed by Sternberg and revised by Li-Fang Zhang,and the VLS Questionnaire was the revised version of Wang Qiang&Wu Xia’squestionnaire, which is based on O’Malley and Chamot’s strategy classification. Inorder to avoid the confounding of second language proficiency, all the items in thetwo questionnaires are translated into Chinese. The VP Test in this research isdesigned by Nation.Data analyses generate the following findings: a) TS, VLS and VP correlated witheach other and some of the relationships among them three are significant.; b) TS islikely to affect their VP, and oligarchic style, legislative style and conservative stylesignificantly influence VP; c) All of the types of TS except external style correlatewith VLS; d) VLS, in particular guessing, using dictionary, using word-structure anddeduction, is closely related to VP, and e) TS, VLS interact with each other ininfluencing VP.This study provides several important implications for second languageteaching and learning. On the teachers’ side, they should respect students’ different TS and VLS so as to gradually improve teaching methods to facilitate students’academic achievements. For students, knowing that their failure in vocabularylearning may result from their preferred ways of doing things may promote morereflection on their learning behaviors, and thus lead to the choice of strategies that canyield maximum learning outcome..