A Study On Vocational School Students' English Vocabulary Learning Beliefs And Vocabulary Learning Strategies

As a key component of language, vocabulary is fundamental tointerpersonal communication. The famous linguist Wilkins stated that "withoutgrammar very little can be conveyed?without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”.(Wilkins,1972, p.111-112). Hence, the cultivation of listening, reading, writing, andspeaking skills entails the learning of a large number of words. This shows thatvocabulary learning plays an important role in the development of L2proficiency.However, many EFL learners find it is very difficult for them to memorize Englishvocabulary effectively, and what is more challenging is to use the words they havelearned to achieve communicative purposes.In the past twenty years, many linguists and language teachers have realized theimportance of helping language learners to master the target language vocabulary byusing vocabulary learning strategies. Studies were carried out to test the effect ofvocabulary learning strategies on the result of vocabulary learning, and learners fromdifferent age groups and different language levels were recruited as participants.However, very few researches on vocabulary learning strategies adopted byvocational school students have been conducted. The present study attempts toexplore vocabulary learning beliefs held by the vocational school students and thestrategies they use to learn vocabulary.The study is based on O' Malley and Chamot's classification of learningstrategies, which are metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social andaffective strategies. It attempts to answer the following three research questions:(1) What are the vocational school students' beliefs about vocabulary learning?(2) Are there any significant differences in VLS adopted by the male learners andthe female learners?(3) Would the students from five different majors differ in their use of the English vocabulary learning strategies?A survey was used to collect the data, which was analyzed by SPSS17.0. Themajor findings are presented as follows:1) Most of the vocational school students hold the belief that words should belearned by rote memory and only some of them believe that English words can belearned by using them for communication.2) There is no significant difference between the male and the female students intheir means of using the meta-cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies,while the two groups' means of cognitive strategies use differ significantly.3) Significant mean differences are found between the learners from differentmajors in their meta-cognitive strategy and cognitive strategy use, while their meansin social and affective strategy use do not reach the significant level.The results of the study will provide implications for vocabulary teaching andlearning in vocational schools, and help teachers and learners to realize theimportance of vocabulary learning strategy training and use.