VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

PHAN DIỄM MY

A study of English vocabulary learning
strategies of 12th graders at Nguyen Tat
Thanh high school in Hanoi, Vietnam
(Nghiên cứu về những chiến lược học từ vựng
tiếng Anh của học sinh lớp 12 trường THPT
Nguyễn Tất Thành, Hà Nội)

A Master Thesis

Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60140111

Hanoi, 2017


VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES

PHAN DIỄM MY

A study of English vocabulary learning
strategies of 12th graders at Nguyen Tat
Thanh high school in Hanoi, Vietnam
(Nghiên cứu về những chiến lược học từ vựng

contributions are sincerely appreciated and gratefully acknowledged.
First of all, I would like to express my deep appreciation and indebtedness
particularly to Assoc.Prof. Nguyen Van Trao, PhD, my supervisor, whose
expertise, endless support, kind and understanding spirit during my dissertation
made it possible for me to work on a topic that was of great interest to me, for
finding out time to reply to my emails, for being ever so kind to show interest in
my research and for giving his precious advice regarding the topic of my
research. It is my pleasure working with him.
I also appreciate the authority of University of the Languages and
International Studies in general and Faculty of Postgraduate Studies indeed for
giving me their permission and required samples to carry out the research in the
university library.
I would like to express my gratitude to all my lecturers who put their faith in
me and urged me to do better.
I am thankful to Nguyen Tat Thanh high school‘s teachers and students for
their strong kindness and support during my data collection of the research.
I am highly indebted to my mom, to all my relatives, friends and others who
in one way or another shared their support, either morally, financially and
physically, and gave me a lot of encouragement for keeping up with this task.

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Abstract
This study investigated the English vocabulary learning strategy use by 100
students with different levels (50 from talented classes and 50 from other
classes) enrolled at Nguyen Tat Thanh High School in Hanoi, directly under
Vietnam National University of Education. The study found a curvilinear
relationship between strategy use and English proficiency which means the high
achievers (subjects with higher proficiency than the others) prefer using more

6. DESIGN OF THE STUDY ............................................................................... 3
7. DEFINITION OF TERMS (OR KEY CONSTRUCTS) .................................. 3
PART B: DEVELOPMENT ................................................................................. 6
CHAPTER 1:......................................................................................................... 6
LITERATURE REVIEW...................................................................................... 6
1. Theoretical background ..................................................................................... 6
1.1. Background of vocabulary learning strategies .......................................... 6
1.2. Taxonomy of language learning strategies ................................................ 7
1.2.1. Stern's (1992) Classification of Language Learning Strategies ......... 7
1.2.2. Schmitt’s classification of vocabulary learning strategies ................. 8
2. Practical backgrounds ....................................................................................... 9
2.1. Students’ understanding and performance in their English vocabulary
learning ............................................................................................................. 9
2.2. High achievers’ opinions on vocabulary learning................................... 10
2.3. Teachers’ performance in their English vocabulary teaching ................ 10
3. Review of the previous studies ....................................................................... 11
3.1. Carlo’s research (2004) ........................................................................... 11
3.2. Francis’s research (2015) ........................................................................ 11
3.3. Zheng’s research (2012) .......................................................................... 12
3.4. Kim (2014)................................................................................................ 12
3.5. According to Decarrico (2001). ............................................................... 12
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3.6. Nguyen‘s research (2015) ........................................................................ 12
CHAPTER 2:....................................................................................................... 13
METHODOLOGY .............................................................................................. 13
1. Research questions restated............................................................................. 13
2. Research method ............................................................................................. 13
3. Setting of the Study ......................................................................................... 14


6. Think-aloud protocols by the high achievers .................................................. 28
6.1. Guessing from context .............................................................................. 28
6.2. Use of dictionaries ................................................................................... 31
7. High achievers‘ opinions about vocabulary learning ...................................... 32
7.1. Importance of vocabulary learning.......................................................... 32
7.2. What “knowing a word” means to the high achievers ............................ 32
7.2.1. Word meaning ................................................................................... 32
7.2.2. Spelling and pronunciation ............................................................... 33
7.3. Lack of time on vocabulary learning ....................................................... 33
PART C: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS ............................................ 34
1. Summary of major findings ............................................................................ 34
2. Concluding remarks and Recommendations................................................... 35
3. Limitations of the study .................................................................................. 40
4. Suggestions for further researches .................................................................. 40
REFERENCES .................................................................................................... 42
APPENDICES ..................................................................................................... 44

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PART A: INTRODUCTION
1.

RATIONALE OF THE STUDY
Some countries use English as the mother tongue and other countries learn it as second


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subtle social or cultural information that each new word provided conveys can be successfully
transmitted to students.
Learning a second language involves the manipulation of four main skills: listening,
speaking, reading and writing. One crucial factor embedded in all four skills that helps the
success of the second language acquisition is the vocabulary enrichment. Very few empirical
research have been carried out exclusively to investigate learning strategies which pupils need
employ for dealing with learning foreign language vocabulary. An English Vocabulary Lists
for high schools strongly needs to be developed to raise students‘ awareness of how words
are formed and related to each other, such as synonyms, antonyms, collocations and idiomatic
uses of words; whereas the vocabulary teaching and learning introduction as a discrete topic
still remain rare in Nguyen Tat Thanh High School.
From the above reasons, investigating students‘ vocabulary learning strategies and also
presenting some effective techniques to teach English vocabulary in high schools are my
ambition in order that students can improve their English vocabulary learning. Despite my
knowledge limitation and the frame of the graduation paper, the research paper entitled ―A
study of English vocabulary learning strategies of 12th graders at Nguyen Tat Thanh High
School in Hanoi, Vietnam‖ was conducted with my entire best endeavor.
2. AIMS OF THE STUDY
The study investigates the Nguyen Tat Thanh High School pupils‘ perceptions and their
actual use of learning English vocabulary strategies in their vocabulary learning. Specifically,
this study aims to:
- investigate the pupils‘ opinions on learning English vocabulary and their actual
vocabulary learning;
- identify if there is a significant difference between the use of the strategies by the
high achievers and other participants in the study; and
- suggest some implications for English vocabulary teaching and learning.
3. THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS


examined by means of a think-aloud task and semi-structured interview. Finally, the study
would give teachers the mutual understanding about the vocabulary acquisition among the
learners so that teachers could make adjustments or enhancements to vocabulary teaching
as well as strategy training.
5. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
As seen, one of the most difficulties in reading is caused by vocabulary; so the study is
formed to fill this gap and undertake a preliminary exploratory investigation designed to
examine types of strategies which pupils employ in order to obtain new vocabulary items
based on questionnaires and oral interviews.
The Nguyen-Tat-Thanh-high-school pupils‘ perceptions and their actual use of learning
English vocabulary strategies are clearly viewed, hence to improve their vocabulary size and
enrich words already known.
A significant difference between the use of strategies by high achievers and other
participants will be seen in the study.
6. DESIGN OF THE STUDY
The study includes five chapters:
The introductory chapter: Introduction, represents rationale of the study, aims of the study,
scope of the study, significance of the study, research questions and overview of the thesis.
Chapter 1: Literature review, presents a review of literature, concentrating on the issues
relates vocabulary learning strategies and perceptions.
Chapter 2: Methodology, describes the methodology employed in the study, the data
collection instruments, the subjects, and the data collection procedures.
Chapter 3: Findings and Discussion, presents the results and give some discussions of the
results.
The conclusion chapter: Conclusion and Implications, summarizes the findings, shows the
limitations, gives recommendations and makes suggestions for further research.
7. DEFINITION OF TERMS (OR KEY CONSTRUCTS)
1. High achievers (n): Students who have high achievements in English study


addition to, or rather than from, history or fact
19. Semantic (adj): be related to the study of meaning
20. Affixes (n): morphemes attached to a word stem to form a new word
21. Cognates (n): words that have a common etymological origin
22. Morphological relationships (n): relationships relevant to morphology linguistics
23. Efficacy (n): the capacity for beneficial change (or therapeutic effect) of a given
intervention, most commonly used in the practice of medicine and pharmacology

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24. ELT settings (n): English Language Teaching settings
25. Metaphorical competence (n): A Language Learning Strength of. Students with a
Holistic Cognitive Style
26. Autonomy (n): Self-government; freedom to act or function independently
27. Follow-through (n): activity to carry through to complete a task; to see a task through
to its completion
28. Taxonomy (n): the practice and science of classification of things or concepts,
including the principles that underlie such classification
29. Bilingual (adj): be able to speak two languages with the facility of a native speaker
30. Retrieval (n): 1.The process of accessing information from memory or other storage
devices. 2. The possibility of being retrieved or restored

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PART B: DEVELOPMENT
CHAPTER 1:
LITERATURE REVIEW
1. Theoretical background


objectives and include in the pre-instructional activities, testing and follow-through, help
learners‘ study more efficient and increase their self-directed learning.
1.2. Taxonomy of language learning strategies
Table A: Defining language learning strategies (Wenden & Rubin, 1987, p.32)
Authors

What are LLS?

What are LLS for?

Rubin

Techniques or devices

To acquire knowledge.

Bailystok

Methods/

To

conscious

enterprises

exploit

available

To learn and regulate

Strategic knowledge
Knowledge

learning on L2.

about

learning
O‘Malley & Chamot

Special

thoughts

behaviors

or

To help comprehend,
learn

or

retain

new

information.

from the first four options for learners to be able to discern the new word's part of speech in
the guessing process.

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Guessing an unknown word's meaning from context has been seen to fit in more
comfortably with the communicative approach; nevertheless, it commonly refers to inferring a
word's meaning from the surrounding words in a written text. First, it highly requires the
learner to have a certain level of language proficiency in order to use this strategy, including
the ability to accurately decode the orthographical form of new words and also have adequate
background knowledge of the subject and the strategic knowledge of how to effectively go
through the inferencing process. In addition, the context itself is considered rich enough with
clues to enable guessing, with the most easily utilizable clues being in close proximity to the
target word.
A second way to discover a new meaning is the Social Strategy of asking someone who
knows, particularly teachers (often in this position), who can be asked to give help in a variety
of ways: giving the L1 translation, a synonym, a definition by paraphrase or using the new
word in a sentence, or any combination of these. The advantage of L1 translations is being
fast, easily understood by students, and possible to the transfer of all the knowledge
(collocations, associations, etc.) onto the L2 equivalent; however, the disadvantages remain
that the teacher must know learners' mother tongue and most translation pairs tend to be not
exact equivalents.
Grouping plays an important role in recalling, but learners often organize words into
groups naturally without prompting. Learners can learn new words by studying them with
pictures of their meaning instead of definitions. Alternatively, learners can create their own
mental images of a word's meaning which is seen more effective than mere repetition for
reading passages.
The present study implements the theory given by Schmitt (1993) as the mainstreaming
model during research and analysis schedules.

word cards, learning vocabulary through reading, listening and speaking, etc. Sometimes,
word collocations, different meanings of an item, grammar-related words and affixes, etc. are
also taught. Despite all these helpful techniques, the words are only dealt with in an isolated
manner; hence, some more effective methods are strongly essential to stimulate the students‘
interests in learning the vocabulary. The learners definitely feel boring with explaining the
words one by one and learning words by memorizing the word list alone, and hence would
lose interests in vocabulary learning after a while. The efficiency of vocabulary
teaching/learning could not be fulfilled without adequate methods and interests. So the
urgently existing problem is a better teaching method needed to effectively enlarge the
learners‘ vocabulary and enhance the learners‘ understanding of the lexical meanings for the
sake of improving the efficiency of English vocabulary teaching and learning in the class.
Teachers tend to build up their own curriculum based on the content of the lesson, the
students‘ level, the grammatical items they want to teach to find a suitable method in order to
achieve the best results.
Techniques for presentation


Presenting the new-word structures through contextualization

Either real or simulated situations have been used by teachers to make learning activity
more effective and the students more motivated by means of contextualization in the teaching
of new words; also, the full use of real situations in the classroom is often made and combined
with the appropriate facial expression and actions to make the lesson more interesting and the
meaning of the items clearer.


Presenting the new-word structures through dialogues

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Virginia and Massachusettes. Shared book readings of a variety of text genres, including
newspaper articles, diaries, first-hand documentation of the immigrant experience, historical
accounts and fiction are provided for each weekly lesson. Words are considered best learned
from rich semantic contexts; because of the fact that activities helped children make semantic
links to other words and concepts and thus to attain a deeper and richer understanding of each
word‘s meaning, to infer meanings from context and to use roots, affixes, cognates,
morphological relationships and comprehension monitoring.
3.2. Francis’s research (2015)
Francis aimed to examine the efficacy of incorporation instructional practices associated
with improved outcomes into middle-school social studies instruction in the same central
Texas school districts as a means of improving vocabulary knowledge and comprehension for
ELLs. It includes (a) selecting words to improve students‘ academic language, (b) providing
students with opportunities to encounter new words in texts and video clips. The seventh-

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grade students (381) at both middle schools were randomly assigned to 15 sections of
seventh-grade social studies classrooms at their schools.
3.3. Zheng’s research (2012)
Two questionnaires were designed and directed to more than 100 students and teachers in
one of China‘s key universities to improve vocabulary learning and teaching in ELT settings.
An enhanced awareness of cultural difference, metaphorical competence and learners‘
autonomy in vocabulary acquisition would effectively facilitate the vocabulary learning to
help them overcome their general learning style limitations.
3.4. Kim (2014)
The study was designed to investigate English vocabulary learning troubles that nonnative speakers have in learning English word systems with roots and standard rules for
prefixes and suffixes extending the way these core items are used. A total of 54 student into
two groups took part in the experiment at a private English School in Korea, in which the
study was carried out over 10 weeks with only 10 minutes out of each 50-minute class used

other participants in the study?
(4) How do the high achievers in Nguyen Tat Thanh High School perceive vocabulary
learning?
2. Research method
In this study, questionnaires, think-aloud tasks and interviews were adopted to achieve
the stated research aims. Using questionnaires helps reduce expense and time involved in
training interviewers and sending them to interview. The questions are designed to be a high
order, concise, meaningful questions and stated in common language. Respondents were
given the same set of questions phrased in exactly the same way; therefore, data covering
large amounts of information can be collected from a large number of people may be
collected and analysed more comparably and objectively in a short period of time and in a
relatively cost effective way than those obtained via an interview. For think-aloud protocols,
participants are required to think aloud when performing a set of specified tasks and asked to
say whatever comes into their mind to complete the task (including what they are looking at,
thinking, doing, and feeling); hence, researchers have insights into the participant's cognitive
processes during task performance.
On the other hand, by interviewing, the interviewer can clarify questions and observe
verbal and non-verbal behaviors of the respondents as well as the informants tend to respond
in any manner they see fit. Indeed, interview is a means of obtaining personal information,
attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs. First, interviewer gives students open-practical questions;
whereas think-aloud protocols are given in writing forms for selected students to follow and
answer. Second, the researcher gathered data by using various sources of data was done to
better understand the scope of happenings in the classroom, then selected the suitable data for
the research issue and organised the data in a logical way to identify trends and themes. Next,
data was interpreted to analyse and identify major themes throughout using different kinds of

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data from classroom data, individual data to subgroup data. Finally, by assessing the effects of

English is definitely necessary.
Questionnaire I was distributed to 100 students (50 from talented classes and 50 from
other classes), while Questionnaire II was handed out to the teachers respectively. In order to
help the subjects to understand the questions, every question and choices in student‘s
questionnaires was dubbed in its Vietnamese translation. The students were required to fulfill

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the questionnaire in one class hour, while the teachers were expected to finish it in their spare
time of the day. The answer sheets were collected after all subjects had finished them. 100
copies of student questionnaires and 10 copies of teacher questionnaires were sent out,
completed, collected and analyzed.
4. Data collection instruments and procedures
4.1. Vocabulary learning strategies questionnaires
In this study, questionnaires, which consists of a variety of questions of different types
such as multiple choice questions, ranking questions, yes/no questions and open-ended
questions, were used (quantitative method) as a data collection instrument because of the
following reasons. The questionaires on vocabulary learning strategies set up were based on
the referencing process related as well as the overall observation of traditionally and newlyapplied learning methods by students. First, a large amount of information is obtained from a
wide range of individuals. Then, researchers have a chance to find the appropriate answers to
the needed questions. Clearly, questionnaires as one of the most objective means of collecting
data foster students express their own opinions without fear to be embarrassed or punished
and disclose their names when filling in the questionnaires.
This present study used a pre-questionnaire (Question 1 to 7) and a post-questionnaire
(Question 8 to 11). The pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire were administered to the
teachers and students so as to investigate the teachers and students‘ attitudes towards English
vocabulary teaching and learning. The post-questionnaire has a different format and content
with the pre-questionnaire, which evaluates different vocabulary learning strategies students
use in their study process as well as their perception of effectiveness.

comprehension (Gunning, 1996). Students' strengths and weakness can be diagnosed by
teachers. Eight excerpts in written forms are designed to examine guessing ability of the high
achievers in vocabulary learning.
4.3. Semi-structured interview
Semi-structured interviews, which are believed to provide a 'deeper' understanding of
social phenomena than those obtained from purely quantitative methods, such as
questionnaires, not only comprise several key questions for defining the areas to be explored
but also help the interviewer or interviewee in order to pursue an idea or response in more
details. In this study, five questions were used to interview the high achievers.
Question 1 explores the high achievers‘ general knowledge about the meaning of a word.
Questions 2+3 find out the high achievers‘ opinions on the importance of vocabulary learning.
Question 4 investigates their study plans.
Question 5 examines their outside-classroom learning strategies.
5. Data analysis procedures
All the data were collected and analysed using a systematic process of analysis and
interpretation according to the preset criteria. So the result of the analysis can be used to
compare the changes in my own teaching and also my students‘ learning.
Turning back to the investigated classes, after several weeks, these classes were recorded
again. All available information and data were synthesized. The outcomes are considered very
positive. More complex interactions took place during the lessons. There is much greater
involvement and interest in vocabulary improvements expressed by the students, and the
complexity of their language is enhanced.

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