The Impact Of Vocabulary Learning And Teaching Strategies On Vocabulary Learning Outcomes

It is not a new story that students’ vocabulary learning outcomes vary greatly. In order to find possible reasons leading to the differences, the author tries to study this mystery from two perspectives:vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary teaching strategies. Reported empirical studies have mostly focused on the correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary learning results, while vocabulary teaching strategies have received much less attention. The present study intends to explore the impacts of vocabulary learning strategies and vocabulary teaching strategies on vocabulary learning outcomes.The aims of this thesis are:(1) to explore the overall pattern of vocabulary learning strategies used by students from different majors and grades;(2) to compare differences in the use of vocabulary learning strategies between high scorers and low scorers in a lexical proficiency test;(3) to find out whether students from higher grades perform better than their counterparts from lower grades in the same lexical proficiency test;(4) to investigate whether learners’ lexical proficiencies had an impact on the mastery of words they had met in their English Intensive Reading Class;(5) to investigate what vocabulary teaching strategies were used most frequently by two target teachers;(6) to explore the influences of teachers’ vocabulary teaching strategies on learners’ vocabulary learning results.There are580students and2English teachers from Hainan University participating in this study. Six vocabulary tests, a vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire and a voice recorder were used for data collection.There are six findings from this study. First, students from higher grades tended to use few strategies compared with students from lower grades regardless of their majors. Second, high scorers in the lexical proficiency test used strategies more often than low scorers and were more active in the use of social and affective strategies. Third, the mean score in the lexical proficiency test for non-English major freshmen was slightly higher than that of non-English major sophomores, indicating that non-English major students’ lexical proficiency decreased slightly as they moved up from freshman year to sophomore year. In contrast, the mean score in the lexical proficiency test for English major juniors was remarkably higher than that of English major sophomores, indicating a sharp increase in lexical competence after one year’s professional training. Fourth, learners’ lexical proficiencies demonstrated positive relations with their mastery of words in their English Intensive Reading Class. Fifth, translating words into Chinese and defining words in English were two most used vocabulary teaching strategies by the two teachers. Sixth, teachers’influence on students’vocabulary learning results was very limited.Based on the above findings, the author makes two recommendations:(1) students must understand the importance of vocabulary learning and try to adopt various kinds of vocabulary learning strategies to improve their vocabulary learning efficiency;(2) teachers should constantly improve their vocabulary proficiency and apply more teaching techniques to make vocabulary learning more interesting.