Vocabulary plays an important role in the process of EFL (English as a foreignlanguage) learning. Words "are basic building blocks of language" (Brown 1994: 365).'But for Chinese learners, vocabulary learning has long been one of the difficult andineffective processes. For quite a long period of time, the research on teaching andlearning vocabulary has been neglected, many language teachers who think that"vocabulary can be left to take care of itself. (Nation,1990:l)." So even though EFLlearners spend a great deal of time on the word memorization, it turns out that theirvocabulary profession is still a great barrier in their language learning process. So,vocabulary learning, as one of the crucial issues in EFL learning and indispensable partof language proficiency, was brought to the research field again in the previous fewdecades and researchers luckily found that it do deserve special attention.Nowadays the contemporary study in vocabulary acquisition research can be datedback till 1980, when P. Meara published an article to show that the last two decades haswitnessed a rapid development in vocabulary learning field. Vocabulary as a carrier ofmeaning and vital component of any language is explicitly stressed and emphasized.Consequently a large number of empirical studies have been conducted byresearchers (Nation, 1983; Carter & McGarthy, 1988; Gu & Johnson, 1996; Lawson &Hogben, 1996; Wu & Wang, 1998). Some of these studies concentrate on specificvocabulary learning strategies, some of them focus on the interrelationship between 'learners' vocabulary learning strategies and their vocabulary outcomes, while somestudies work on the differences between higher achievers and lower achievers. IMost of the studies are conducted in western background and western learners are 'the main part of the participation. Will the learning strategies adopted by Chineselearners be the same as those of native speakers of the languages? Will the strategieseffective to westerners still be useful for Chinese students? As a result, the vocabularylearning strategies in Chinese background deserve investigation. Consequently manyscholars and researchers in china have conducted researches in this area. Meanwhile,many empirical studies have been made in recent years, such as those conducted by Gu& Johson(1996:643-679),WangWenyu (1998： 47-52) . In the study of Gu & Johson(1996:643-679), 850 sophomore non- English majors are investigated. Wu Xia & WangQiang (1998:53-57) researched on the vocabulary learning beliefs and strategies of 202sophomore non-English majors. However Wang Wenyu (1998： 47-52) only involved25 English majors and 25 non-English majors in his study. Therefore, vocabularylearning strategies adopted by Chinese students around English environment is rarelystudied, let alone those employed by tuition-free normal students majoring in English.As a result, the present thesis aims at drawing a vivid picture concerning thevocabulary learning strategies as well as beliefs adopted by tuition-free normal studentsmajoring in English through a written questionnaire plus a vocabulary levels test. By thedata through SPSS, the author describes the students' general vocabulary learning statusand explores the interrelationship between the students' vocabulary profession and theirlearning strategies as well as，英语论文，英语论文范文 |
