英语论文网

ategy. It has been widely acknowledged that language-processing strategies exist and influence SLA. [1]
But “during the practice directed by different kinds of approaches or methods, it is found that none of them can be very successful in English teaching without students’ development vocabulary…. The root of the problems is that students have great weakness in vocabulary.”[2]
Why? Because the teaching and learning of vocabulary has never arouse the same degree of interest within language teaching as that of grammatical competence, contrastive analysis, reading, or writing, which have received considerable attention from scholars and teachers. [3] So from here, we can see though English is learnt or taught widely in China in recent years, generally speaking, learners or teachers cast highlights on translation and grammar during the years before 1990s. Recently, more attention has been paid to communication in English learning. It seems that vocabulary is never stressed enough in English learning and teaching. In reality, emphasis on vocabulary is reasonable and feasible.
Language is used as an instrument of communication in a society. And vocabulary is the most basic element involved in communication, because communication often breaks down when people do not use the right words.
Also, the importance of vocabulary has been pointed out so such as Wilkins, a famous linguist: “Were it not for grammar, a lot of things can’t be expressed; however, if there were no words, we couldn’t express anything.”[4] So an important aspect to improve the foreign language level for foreign language learners is to master the morphology of the language being studied.
Therefore, vocabulary plays such an important role in language and language acquisition that it is possible to learn English with high efficiency if vocabulary is centered from the very beginning to the end.
However, English is rich in vocabulary; there are about 1,000,000 words. The practical number of English vocabulary is about 9,000…. To be communicatively competent, at least 5,000 words are required for a good foreign language learner because more than 2,000 words are essential for an average conversation, and it’s advised that neat tricks of vocabulary learning are necessary for English as a second language student to begin to make sense of what they are asked to read in school.
Then how can the students master such large number of vocabulary easily? It seems that it’s a great burden for them to memorize a large number of words. It has been long viewed that reciting from vocabulary list is the only choice. Sometimes it works, but it consumes much time and becomes poorly efficient.
“Vocabulary learning is a permanent, strategy-based task, and not just a rot-memorizing work. Mnemonic skills are very important and necessary in vocabulary learning.”[5] But if students are well aware of some neat tricks, that is, highly effective learning strategies, they can make appropriate use of those neat tricks that the thesis offers. More importantly, they can discover, even invent some new methods of their own with the new tool. “Anxiety will be lowered, and self-esteem will be established. Vocabulary learning will be both effective and efficient.”[6]
2. Theoretical foundations
2.1Current research findings of language learning strategies (LLS)
It’s viewed that second language learning strategies can play a rather pervasive role in second language learning, and resea