An Empirical Study On English Vocabulary Memory Strategies Of Grade One Students In Senior High School

Vocabulary, used as the carrier of our thoughts, is the foundation of human language.Since English vocabulary plays a significant part in English learning, it takes Chinese studentsquite some time to learn it. However, vocabulary teaching and learning methods have notreceived due attention from English teachers and students. Rather, the defects of ourtraditional English teaching have added difficulties to students’ vocabulary learning,especially concerning those who have just entered the senior high school. A large vocabularyis what they must face in this transitional period. In order to relieve the pressure of students,teachers have to come up with effective vocabulary memorizing strategies to help them meetthe requiements of New English Curriculum Standards. Thanks to the development ofCognitive Psychology, scholars have focused on the research of effectiveness of vocabularymemory strategies. Although there are many relevant studies and theories related to memorystrategies, few are associated with high school students.To enrich studies in this field, this research raises the following three questions:(1) What is the current situation of senior one students’ use of vocabulary memorystrategies? What’s the frequency of each memory strategy?(2) Can vocabulary memory strategy training enhance senior one students’ vocabularycapacity?(3) Can vocabulary memory strategy training arouse students’ interest in vocabularylearning?To answer these questions, the reaseacher carried out an experiment of vocabularymemory strategies on senior one stuents. The subjects are124senior one high school studentsfrom two intact classes of Linfen Tongsheng School of Shanxi Province. Class A1which adopts the traditional teaching method is the control class, while Class A2which adopts thevocabulary memory strategies training is the experimental class. After the16weekexperiment, data was collected and processed by SPSS13.0. The results are shown below:(1) The overall level of students’ use of vocabulary memory strategies is not very high.High school students use repetition strategy most frequently, and chunk memorizing strategyleast frequently.(2) Students’ vocabulary proficiency appears to be positively correlated with specificstrategies used by them.(3) The strategies can stimulate students’ enthusiasm in learning vocabulary and buildup their confidence to learn English.Exploring English vocabulary memory strategies actively eases the vocabuary burdenon senior one students and can help to improve their English. English teachers shuldconsciously help learners form situable vocabulary memory strategies so that they canimprove their vocabulary proficiency.