A Study On English Majors’ English Vocabulary Learning Strategies

As a fundamental part of language learning, vocabulary plays an important role andeven a role in deciding the skills of language learners. Without vocabulary, languagelearners can hardly acquire four essential skills of language competence.In the present study, it explores the learning situation of English learners from theperspective of the learning strategy through questionnaire and experiment. This studydiffers from others in that it combines questionnaire with experiment. In this study, theexperiment was based on the questionnaire, the result of which was selected as variables inthe experiment. Both the questionnaire and experiment were carried out in a university inGuangdong province, with freshmen of English major as its research subjects. The aims ofthis study are as follows:1. What vocabulary learning strategies do English majors usuallyuse?2. What is the correlation between the frequently-used strategies and their results?From the questionnaire, the result shows that the top five frequently-used vocabularylearning strategies are context, dictionary, rehearsal, phonetic method and imagery method.For the sake of time and people, the experiment was made on only three vocabularylearning strategies. The participants were randomly divided into three groups, eachincluding twenty people. A pre-test was taken to see whether these three groups ofparticipants have the same vocabulary levels and if not, some adjustments would be made.The three groups of participants received three different instructions of vocabulary learningstrategy respectively and then learned the ten target English words. At last, all theparticipants took an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test. The result shows that in theimmediate post-test, the group which accepted the imagery method in vocabulary learningperformed better than the other two groups. On the contrary, the group which used contextmethod performed better in the delayed post-test. But in general, the vocabulary learningeffects of these groups slightly differed from each other. And the participants of the imagerygroup got bigger differences of means in the learning results between the two tests.The research result will benefit both students and teachers. To students, they can learn from the result, grasp more useful vocabulary learning strategies and then make appropriateadjustments to improving their vocabulary learning. To teachers, they can use moreeffective vocabulary learning strategies in their vocabulary teaching and make teachingeffect more prominent.