An Investigation of Non-English Majors’ Vocabulary Learning Beliefs and Strategies

This paper reports an investigation of vocabulary learning beliefs and vocabulary learning strategies employed by Chinese college students. The subjects were 205 first-year non-English majors from an ordinary normal university, and the instruments adopted were a questionnaire, vocabulary test and SPSS. The results indicate: (1) college students believe vocabulary learning is quite important and use most of strategies listed in the questionnaire when learning vocabulary, but only a few strategies are used frequently, especially the cognitive strategies, and the social strategies are seldom used; (2) The successful language learners tend to employ more strategies than the less successful language learners in terms of both category and frequency, especially the cognitive strategies. The results have pedagogical implications for second language vocabulary teaching.