An Empirical Study On Vocabulary Learning Strategies For Senior Two English Underachievers In Senior High School

Vocabulary learning plays an important role in English learning,and it is also the weakest part to senior high school underachievers.According to the research,many English underachievers memorize words by rote memorization,but only to achieve low efficiency.Therefore,it deserves English teachers' great efforts to guide and instruct the students to acquire the most effective strategies for the vocabulary learning.The author chooses respectively 35 senior two English underachievers as the research subjects(70 in total)from two parallel classes of Class 6 and Class 3 in Fuzhou No.15 High School.Through questionnaires and interviews,the author knows the overall characteristics of underachievers' vocabulary learning strategies.Based on this,the author intends to provide the training of vocabulary learning strategies on underachievers,35 students from Class 6 for experimental group and 35 students from Class 3 as control group.The purpose of the training of vocabulary learning strategies is to investigate if it has effects on underachievers' vocabulary scores and vocabulary learning beliefs.The study adopts quantitative and qualitative analyses by the means of questionnaires,interviews,vocabulary tests and conducts a three-month teaching experiment of vocabulary learning strategies in order to address the following questions:(1)What are the overall characteristics of senior two English underachievers on vocabulary learning strategies?(2)What are the effects of the training of the vocabulary learning strategies on the vocabulary learning beliefs of the senior two English underachievers?(3)Does the training of vocabulary learning strategies have effects on the vocabulary scores of senior two English underachievers?The research findings indicate that:(1)Most of the underachievers use vocabulary learning strategies with low frequency.Cognitive strategies are used the most frequently,and metacognitive strategies just follow cognitive strategies,while resource strategies and social strategies are used the least frequently by the underachievers.(2)By comparing the scores of vocabulary learning beliefs between experimental group and control group before and after the training,it shows that the training can greatly change underachievers' vocabulary learning beliefs.(3)The data analysis of pretest and post-test shows that in theexperimental group,the students' score get higher later in vocabulary tests,which indicates that the training is effective in improving underachievers' performance.It is expected that these findings can enrich the study of senior high underachievers on vocabulary learning strategies theoretically,and provide some suggestions for other English teachers' teaching in practice.