The Impact of Strategy Training on Vocabulary Comprehension

This article focuses on a study of the effect of strategy training on vocabulary comprehension. 112 sophomore English-majored students at Yangtze University were chosen as participants in a strategies-based instructional treatment or comparison group students receiving the regular vocabulary course. Data were gained through the performance of a set of two vocabulary tasks on a prepost basis by both groups and were analyzed by the tool SPSS17.0. The subsample of 24 students also provided verbal report data to show their cognitive insights into strategy use and the instruction itself. The findings showed that 1) Chinese English-majors used a variety of English vocabulary learning strategies in vocabulary learning, including metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies. 2) The increased use of vocabulary strategies contributed positively to vocabulary and article comprehension.