The present study employed a quantitative approach to investigate the

CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY

The present study employed a quantitative approach to investigate the

vocabulary learning strategies used by participants and the relationship between the reported use of strategies with participants’ English reading proficiency. Detailed information of the research methodology is presented in the following order: (a) information about the participants, (b) the instruments employed in the study, (c) the procedures of data collection, and (d) data analysis for this study.

Participants

Participants in this study comprised 106 third-year vocational high school students from a girls’ vocational high school in northern Taiwan. There are 74 students from Department of Business Affairs and 32 students from Department of Clothing Making. There are two reasons why the researcher chose third-year students as participants. First, they have learned English at least five years and are supposed to be more stable in their choice of vocabulary learning strategies compared with first year and second year students. Second, the third-year students are supposed to be more reliable in questionnaire-answering and more serious in test-taking. These students were going to take Technological and Vocational Education Joint College Entrance Examination in May, 2007. They were assumed to spend more time on their study and thus apply their vocabulary learning strategies more frequently than first-year and second-year students did. It is more reliable to investigate students who can easily recall their recent use of vocabulary learning strategies. And because of the pressure of passing the college entrance examination, they tended to take every “big”

test seriously. Thus, with their desire to know how good they really are in English, the

result of the English reading proficiency test is more likely to present their real abilities.

Instruments

Instruments used in this study included an English reading proficiency test and a vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire (see APPENDIX A). The English reading proficiency test was used to investigate participants’ reading proficiency and the vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire was to collect data on participants’

self-report frequency of using vocabulary learning strategies.

English Reading Proficiency Test

The English reading proficiency test was adopted from the reading section in General English Proficiency Test --- Intermediate Level, which consists of three sub-sections, i.e., the vocabulary/structure section, the cloze section, and the reading comprehension section. It should be noted that the vocabulary/structure section tests not only examinees’ vocabulary knowledge, but also their sentence structure knowledge, most of which are grammatical concepts.

According to the introduction of GEPT, it is a criterion-referenced test. It can be

used by individuals to determine their level of proficiency, by public and private

institutions to assist in the selection and placement of employees, and by public and

private schools as entrance, placement, or graduation tests. The examinee who passes

Intermediate level can use basic English to communicate on topics in daily life and

his/her English ability is roughly equivalent to that of a high school graduate in

Taiwan. Since the participants chosen in this study were third-year students and they

were going to be graduated four months after the study was conducted, they were

expected to reach “almost” the equivalent ability to pass the Intermediate Level Test

of GEPT.

Vocabulary Learning Strategy Questionnaire

The design of the questionnaire was primarily based on Schmitt’s (1997) taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategies (1997: 207-208) (see Table 2 in Chapter Two). It not only provided a very comprehensive and organized classification of vocabulary learning strategies, but also dealt specifically with EFL language learners, i.e., native speakers of Japanese. The researcher translated and paraphrased Schmitt’s strategy items into Chinese and made each strategy item a complete sentence. Some strategy items were given examples to provide clear ideas about the use of the strategies (see APPENDIX A). The English version of the questionnaire was also provided for later discussion (see APPENDIX B).

Some modification was made according to the researcher’s teaching experience and for the purpose of balancing the item numbers in each strategy category. For instance, some strategy items, such as semantic feature grids, semantic map, peg method, loci method, keyword method, spaced word practice, and configuration, were deleted because they are complicated for participants to comprehend and are seldom used by vocational high school students. The determination strategy, “check for L1 cognate,” is deleted because there is no Chinese cognate of any English word due to the fact that Chinese is not an Indo-European language. On the other hand, the researcher also added “the use of electronic dictionary,” “ask family members,”

“practice with family members,” “search for related information or books,” “arrange

reviewing schedule,” and “check for your own vocabulary learning strategies,” into

the present questionnaire on the basis of the researcher’s personal observation and

teaching experience. Besides, some revision was also made. For example, the

metacognitive strategy, “use English-language media” was further classified into five

strategies with the use of different media respectively. Finally a questionnaire with 60

vocabulary learning strategy items was completed to investigate participants’

vocabulary learning strategies. Table 4 presents the distribution of the five categories of the vocabulary learning strategies in the questionnaire used in the present study.

Table 4

The Distribution of the Strategy Items in the Strategy Categories in the Questionnaire

Strategy Category The Range of Item Number Subtotal

Determination Strategy (DET) 1-9 9

Social Strategy (SOC) 10-19 10

Memory Strategy (MEM) 20-40 21

Cognitive Strategy (COG) 41-50 10

Metacognitive Strategy (MET) 51-60 10

The researcher changed Schmitt’s original questionnaire with Yes/No questions to one with 5-point Likert-scale ranging from 1 (never), 2 (seldom), 3 (sometimes), 4 (often), to 5 (always). The participants were asked to indicate how often they used a particular vocabulary learning strategy by circling a number from one to five on the questionnaire (see Appendix A).

Data Collection Procedures

The data were collected at the end of the first semester of school year 2006.

First, the questionnaire was pre-tested with another class of 36 third-year students to

check the wording of the questionnaire. After that, the formal vocabulary learning

strategy questionnaire was distributed to the participants by the researcher. The three

classes of students filled out the questionnaire in the same day during a period of

regular English class. It took each class about 30 minutes, including the direction

section, to complete the questionnaire. Students were orally informed of the following

information prior to filling out the questionnaire:

(1) The questionnaire is not a test; thus, there is no right or wrong answer.

(2) Please make your own decision depending on your own learning habit.

(3) Please try to answer as honestly as you can and not consult with your classmates because people might learn in completely different ways.

(4) Please try to give responses according to how you actually learn words, but not based on how you might be learning them.

(5) You are free to ask for clarification when you are filling out the questionnaire.

After all the participants had filled out the vocabulary learning strategy questionnaire, the English reading proficiency test was carried out in the next regular English class. All of the three classes took the test under the researcher’s supervision.

The reading proficiency test was meant both to investigate students’ English reading proficiency and to differentiate the high and low English reading proficiency learners to make a comparison. To compare students from top and bottom proficiency extremes, participants who scored top 20% and bottom 20% in the reading proficiency test were selected as high and low English reading proficiency learners for further analysis.

Analysis

The data collected in the study were analyzed quantitatively by using Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS), including descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlations, and independent samples t-tests. It is aimed to find the answers to the three research questions in this study.

To investigate what vocabulary learning strategies are reported to be used by

Taiwanese vocational high school students, descriptive analysis was employed to

show the frequencies of reported use of different vocabulary learning strategies. The

relationship between Taiwanese vocational high school students’ use of vocabulary

learning strategies and their English reading proficiency is analyzed by means of

calculating Pearson correlation coefficients to see the correlation between vocabulary

learning strategy use and reading proficiency. As for the difference between high and

low English reading proficiency students in their use of vocabulary learning strategies,

independent-samples t-tests were performed to see if there is any significant

difference in the strategy use between these two groups of students.