A Study Of The Correlation Between English Vocabulary Learning Strategies And Self-efficacy And English Achievement

Vocabulary learning is a major component in English learning. As Wilkinssummed up the importance of vocabulary learning,"Without grammar very little canbe conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed (1972, p.111)."With the shift of teacher-centered to student-centered teaching, learningstrategies are become increasingly important. Oxford explained why learningstrategies have such great significance:"Strategies are especially important forlanguage learning because they are tools for active, self-directed involvement, whichis essential for developing communicative competence. Appropriate language learningstrategies result in improved proficiency and greater self-confidence (1990, p.1)."Therefore, vocabulary learning strategies are becoming an indispensable part inEnglish learning. The study of English vocabulary learning strategy can be dated backto the1990s. A lot of valuable research results have been achieved over the past fewdecades. The main research subjects are non-English-major college students. Thereare also other researches about middle school students and English majors.However, there are few researchers paying attention to the status of Englishteaching and learning in independent colleges in the previous study. As is known, thestudents of independent colleges need more attention because they have relative lowscores of The National College Entrance Examination (hereafter NCEM), poorEnglish foundation and low level of confidence. Due to the low scores and being lessconfident, these students’ English achievements and levels of self-efficacy are worthyof note. And the relevant literature review shows that empirical studies on thecorrelation between vocabulary learning strategies, self-efficacy and Englishachievements are few. Therefore, this study intends to enquire into whether there isany relationship between learners’ English vocabulary learning strategies,self-efficacy and English achievements.The subjects involved in this study are forty English majors and three teachers.They are from Oxbridge College, Kunming University of Science and Technology.Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches are used. In order to collect theresearch data, two questionnaires and two interviews are employed. Because the two questionnaires have been widely used and tested, the pilot study which involvedfactor analysis and reliability analysis was not further conducted in this study. Thetwo questionnaires were finished by the forty juniors. One is vocabulary learningstrategies questionnaire and the other is self-efficacy questionnaire. The collected datawere put into computer and analyzed by SPSS11.5. And the two interviews containboth interview with teachers and interview with students. There were three teachersand six students involved in the interviews. All the three teachers teach IntegratedEnglish Course. The six students were chosen on the basis of their TEM-4scores,which are categorized into three levels: above-average, average and below-average.The results of the interviews were recorded, analyzed and summarized to make up forthe defect of the questionnaires.Findings reveal that most vocabulary learning strategies used by the subjects arecognitive strategies. Furthermore, there is positive and strong correlation between thesubjects’ vocabulary learning strategies and their English achievements. Besides, thereis also positive correlation between:(1) self-efficacy and English achievement; and (2)self-efficacy and vocabulary learning strategies. The results indicate that the students’low English achievements are related to their level of low self-efficacy and their useof vocabulary learning strategies. Last but not least, the use of metacognitivestrategies has the lowest mean among the three dimensions of vocabulary learningstrategies. The implications of the study for English teaching is that teachers need tomake some improvement on their teaching methods—not only need to study what toteach, but also study how to teach, focusing more on how learners learn English, suchas how to integrate the training of vocabulary learning strategies into teaching, how toraise students’ level of self-efficacy and how to raise students’ awareness ofmeta-cognition.In spite of the implications, there are still some limitations in the study. Firstly, asan research instrument, classroom observation should have been used to obtainadequate information of vocabulary teaching in real classes. Secondly, the size ofthe sample is not big enough, which makes it impossible to generalize the findings toother situations.