The usefulness of vocabulary learning strategy training-teacher’s perspective

Abstract

The study is an attempt to investigate the teachers’ beliefs regarding vocabulary learning strategies and explore the perceived importance of the vocabulary learning strategies effectiveness and their training to students. Further, the purpose is to find the most and the least frequently applied and trained strategies by the teachers based on their students’ classroom learning experiences and comparing the results with existing empirical studies on the usefulness of VLS. Also, the purpose is to find out whether the teachers views on strategy training are affected by such factors as nationality, experience and school type. A mixed method sequential design was used in the study. The qualitative data was obtained through interviews and observations of 10 teacher-participants and analyzed through content analyses. Quantitative analyses were carried out on the basis of the survey results obtained from 136 teacher-respondents and analyzed descriptively through SPSS, and inferentially through ANOVA and t-Test. The survey was designed on the basis of Schmitt’s VLS Taxonomy. Both the qualitative and quantitative findings of the study indicate that teachers’ attribute great importance to vocabulary learning strategies usefulness and their training to students. The results also revealed that the most frequently reported strategy training was metacognitive strategy group, while cognitive strategy was the least frequent. Although nationality, years of experience and school type were responsible for some significance differences mainly related to strategy type preference, they proved to have less effect on the overall teachers’ views on the strategy usefulness and training importance.