An Empirical Study On English Vocabulary Learning Strategies Of Middle School Students

Vocabulary learning plays an important role in language acquisition. Since vocabulary is one of the basis elements in language learning, the learner can’t achieve a high level of the language without a certain amount of vocabulary. As a result, the vocabulary learning strategies seems of great importance for it can improve the effectiveness and efficient of vocabulary learning. Many scholars have contributed to the field, but most of their participants are advanced learners. This thesis takes middle school students as the subject since they are the beginners in learning English, and effective vocabulary learning strategies are more important for them.This thesis is aiming to explore what strategies middle school students adopt and whether these strategies are effective and efficient for them in English vocabulary learning. This paper is composed of five parts. Chapter one is the introduction, which presents the background information and the study purpose. Chapter two is literature review, which gives the overview of the development of the related theory and the empirical research on various English vocabulary learning strategies. Chapter three is the methodology through test, questionnaire and interview. The author takes 95 students of Liao Ning Experimental School as the subjects, and did the experiment for about four month. Chapter four is the results and discussion of the present study. The author compared and analyzed the pre-test results and post-test results of the experimental class and Controlled Class under the help of SPSS 18.0. Chapter five is the last part of the thesis, providing the major findings of the study, the study’s limitations and also the implications and suggestions for further vocabulary learning and teaching.From the results, we can find that middle school students imply a various strategies to learn vocabulary, such as memory strategy and social strategy. What’s more, the effective use of vocabulary learning strategies is of great help for middle school students in vocabulary learning.