The Training Of Vocabulary Learning Strategy Under The Guidance Of Constructivism In Senior High School

Vocabulary is one of the most indispensable parts in language learning, which is abasic element in language abilities such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing.Students are required to master3,000-4,200words and300-500idioms in thecurriculum syllabus of senior English issued in2003. Students are not keen onvocabulary learning and lose confidence in learning vocabulary well. Since seniorhigh school students have to learn1000more words than before, they have greaterchallenges to learn vocabulary. Consequently, it is imperative that useful vocabularyleaning strategies should be explored and trained to obtain better English vocabularylearning achievements.Constructivism playing a great part in educational practice advocates student-centered class, autonomous-constructing learning, cooperative learning andmeaningful context. The research was inclined to train some vocabulary learningstrategies under the guidance of constructivism and test the effectiveness of training.In the research,120students selected at random from12classes were invited tocomplete the questionnaire to have basic information on the use of vocabularylearning strategies. Two classes (experimental class and control class) were invited tocomplete the pre-test vocabulary paper and post-test vocabulary paper. The controlclass learned the vocabulary in traditional strategies while the experimental classlearned vocabulary by trained constructivist strategies (guessing, grouping, wordformation association, word meaning association, etc). SPSS17.0was used to processthe collected data.Results of the questionnaire indicated that students favored the cognitivestrategies most and then the social strategies and at last the meta-cognitive strategies.After14weeks experiment, the experimental class got much higher scores than thoseof control class. The results of the experiment manifest that the training ofconstructivism vocabulary learning strategies is effective. The training ofcommunicative strategy, word formation strategy and guessing from context areeffective whereas training of grouping, word meaning strategies are not effective.The results and findings in the research can provides some reference to further research and vocabulary learning and teaching.