An Investigation Of Vocabulary Learning Strategies Used By Non-english Major Students

Since the mid-1980 s, the research on acquisition of vocabulary has assumed a central role in learning a second language. Nowadays, many studies on vocabulary learning strategy have been conducted on how the specific vocabulary learning strategies used by students or the relationship between the strategies and their belief. However, little attention has been paid to the factors that affected vocabulary learning strategies used by non-English major students such as gender, major and proficiency.This study intended to investigate how Chinese non-English majors employed vocabulary learning strategies in learning English. 155 junior non-English major students(male, 77; females, 78;science students, 76;art students, 79) in different departments of Jiangxi Normal University were involved in this study. Two instruments were used in this study. They were questionnaire adapted from Gu & Johnson’s(1996) and CET4 test. The data were put into computer and coded by SPSS 21.0. Firstly, descriptive analysis was used to examine the overall patterns of the vocabulary learning strategies adopted by the subjects. Then, independent T-test was conducted to find out how gender, major, and English proficiency may affect vocabulary learning strategy use.The study has revealed a number of the findings related to the students? use of vocabulary learning strategies. First, the overall pattern of vocabulary learning strategies used by non-English major was at the middle level; cognitive strategies were the most popularly used. Among the cognitive strategies, the frequently adopted strategies are guessing, dictionary use, rote learning, and note-taking strategies. Secondly, the female students made more use of almost all strategies than male students except for guessing strategy. The two groups showed a great difference in all meta-cognitive strategies, 5 cognitive strategies, and cooperation, self-encouragement strategy. Thirdly, the arts majors used more strategies than science majors except for contextualization, inquiry, and self-encouragement strategy. However, there were significant differences in the use of rote learning, note-taking, and cooperation strategy. Finally, high proficiency students used more vocabulary leaning strategies than low proficiency students. There were significant differences in the use of planning, monitoring, guessing, dictionary, note-taking, activation, self-encouragement strategy.The findings could provide implications to students and teachers for vocabulary learning and teaching. The students should raise their awareness in using vocabulary learning strategies and should try to be actively involved in vocabulary learning. Teachers should be trained in strategy instruction and assessment in order to provide more systematic guidance and they need to be aware of different factor in vocabulary learning in their teaching of vocabulary. In addition, this study showed that the learning of vocabulary was a longitude process, so future researchers should conduct some longitudinal studies on students? use vocabulary learning strategies.