A Study On Vocabulary Learning Strategies In Junior Middle School

Vocabulary is one of the three basic components that consist of language, and vocabulary acquisition is regarded as the most fundamental and important part in mastering one language. Thus vocabulary learning displays its significant role in language learning. However, in real vocabulary learning, the fact is that most L2 learners find it difficult to learn vocabulary and fail to achieve high vocabulary learning efficiency. As vocabulary learning strategies play a dominant role in vocabulary learning, learners’ selection and adoption of vocabulary learning strategies can have a direct impact on their English levels. Scholars at home and abroad have already conducted a lot of studies on vocabulary learning strategies from different perspectives. And in our country, most of the studies are focused on college students, and researches concerning students in middle schools turn out to be comparatively not too much.In view of this, the author of this thesis conducts a questionnaire survey among junior middle school students in order to find out the general situation of their vocabulary learning strategies use during their vocabulary learning, and also tries to find out the correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and learners’ English achievements.The paper attempts to answer the following three questions:1) What kinds of vocabulary learning beliefs do junior middle school students hold?2) What’s the general situation of junior middle school students about their vocabulary learning strategies use?3) What’s the correlation between vocabulary learning strategies and students’ English achievements?The research adopts the method of questionnaire survey, and the questionnaire is based on Gu & Johnson’s classification of vocabulary learning strategies. And the subjects come from a junior middle school in Zhejiang province. The data are collected after the survey and then are analyzed by SSPS 21.0. After the descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation analysis, the findings of the thesis are as the following:1) The vocabulary learning belief that vocabulary should be learned through use is accepted by most of the junior middle school students.2) The overall mean value of vocabulary learning strategies use among junior middle school students is 3.17, belonging to medium frequency, which indicates that students do not use vocabulary learning strategies frequently in their vocabulary learning. And of the two strategies, cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies show no obvious difference concerning being used by students in their vocabulary strategies, and of cognitive strategies, guessing strategies and note-taking strategies are frequently used.3) Vocabulary learning strategies exhibit correlations to learners’ English achievements, among which meta-cognitive strategies show positive correlation to English achievements, while the belief of rote memorization is negatively correlated to English achievements; and cognitive strategies have no correlation to English achievements.At last, based on the findings of the research, the author offers some implications for vocabulary teaching in junior middle school.