How can pupils profit from written form strategies in vocabulary learning? Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,6, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: Several studies have been done over the years to prove or fortify the influence and significance of learning strategies on language learning processes. It is generally agreed today that language strategies have an enhancing influence on the whole spectrum of the language learning process. However, even being aware of this fact language learning strategies particularly for vocabulary learning have been for some reason neglected for many years. That is difficult to understand considering the importance of vocabulary or word knowledge and therefore prerequisite for any further language learning processes. Simultaneously it means that any language process can not take place without vocabulary. Such an important field of a language being just learned through strict memorization has raised questions especially based on retention as pupils could not retain the learned vocabularies over a longer period. Nevertheless, researchers recently have realized the gap in the language learning strategies and have started to explore the field of vocabulary strategies and their influence on vocabulary acquisition. Researchers have found out different strategies covering different fields like spoken form language strategies or written form language strategies and so on in the course of learner-oriented teaching. Against this background, the central question that motivates this paper is: How pupils can profit from written form strategies in vocabulary learning? To answer this question, we begin by taking a closer look at vocabulary learning strategies which are divided in indirect and direct strategies. Given that I will focus on written form vocabulary I will solely focus on direct strategies which are again divided in different substrategies. Afterwards, I will investigate a few methods and research their influence on the vocabulary acquisition and their facilitating factors. Furthermore, I will explore the aspect of learner autonomy to explore the impact of independent learning. Subsequently, I will look at the renewed task of the teachers in terms of vocabulary teaching and the importance of the mental lexicon on vocabulary retention. Finally, I will sum up my results and identify an outlook on further researches. Diverse resources - secondary literature and online publication - were used for the investigation of the question that underlies the paper to show a wide-ranging overview.