The Most and Least Frequent Vocabulary Learning Strategies of High School English Language Learners

Abstract

This study emphasized the most and least frequent vocabulary learning strategies that English language teachers encourage students to use, and the strategies that students actually use to build their vocabulary. Finding out whether the students' most used strategies were teacher-encouraged or independently-learned was another point of interest. The participants included 20 male and 23 female learners of English of ages 18 to 22, all of them students in the Arts program at a Southern Congolese high school. They completed a Likert-scale questionnaire of 34 statements and four short-answer questions. Statistical and content analysis methods were employed. The study revealed contextual guessing and dictionary use to be the most frequently encouraged and used strategies, whereas pronunciation and flashcards were the least frequently encouraged and used. These strategies showed no significant difference between the teacher-encouraged and the student-used strategies, which provided evidence about the important role that language teachers play in students' learning in general, and in strategy in particular. Furthermore, the majority of participants attributed their frequently-used strategies to their teachers' practices and advice. Further discussion stresses the potential reasons why pronunciation receives less attention.

Social Cohesion and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Britain: Impossible Mission!

“…It emerged that Philippine learners demonstrate an overall preference for determination and social VLSs. Whereas, the least used vocabulary learning strategies is the metacognitive with a mean 2.58 (51.6%), which resembles a research conducted by Kaya (2014), he resulted that the least frequent used strategies by Congolese learners as the meta-cognitive strategies. Besides, The Turkish used the determination strategies most frequently and the cognitive strategies were the least frequently employed strategies by them (Çelik & Toptas, 2010).…”

An Exploratory Study of Vocabulary Learning Strategies by Saudi Female First-year EFL University Students

“…In this set of strategies, the most commonly used strategy was guessing an unknown word from context (mean 3.35) -this strategy was selected by all the participants except one (see Table 1). This strategy was also reported in a number of vocabulary studies (Kaya & Charkova, 2014;Schmitt, 1997). The high number of responses can be explained by the factors that have been reported to affect the success of guessing a word from context, such as the ratio of unknown to known words that learners encounter in a text or speech (Hsueh-Chao & Nation, 2000;Nation & Webb, 2011;Schmitt et al, 2011).…”

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Students’ Vocabulary Learning Strategies of Discovery and Consolidation in Malaysian Primary School English Language Classrooms

“…Mean score has the most precise measurement to identify the frequency of use as it includes the magnitude of all scores. Kaya and Charkova's (2014) mean score interpretation were used for this purpose as shown in Table 3. As for standard deviation (SD), it shows how much variation or dispersion from the average (Johnson & Christensen, 2017).…”