Beliefs and Strategies of College EFL Students for Vocabulary Learning

This study aims to investigate EFL students beliefs and strategies for learning vocabulary and examine how these beliefs and strategies vary in relation to vocabulary proficiency. The participants consisted of 110 college students aged 20-27 years from different majors. According to the scores achieved on an English vocabulary proficiency test, they were placed into two groups (high- and low-level learners) and responded to a self-report questionnaire in class. Descriptive statistics were computed for all the items on the questionnaire. The findings showed that: (1) most of the participants emphasized the belief that vocabulary ought to be studied and used more than the belief that vocabulary should be acquired in context; (2) a significant relationship between the participants beliefs and vocabulary proficiency was not found; (3) the participants predominantly favored using dictionary strategies for comprehension; (4) high-level learners used partial items of selective attention, self-initiation, dictionary looking-up strategies, oral repetition, semantic encoding, contextual encoding, and intentional activation of new words significantly more than low-level learners; and (5) low-level learners employed visual repetition significantly more than their counterparts. Pedagogical implications for EFL classroom teachers are suggested.