ACADEMIC ENGLISH VOCABULARY LEARNING STRATEGIES: REFLECTIONS BY UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

The present study was set out to investigate EFL university students’ reflections on the strategies for learning academic English words. Fifty-five students’ vocabulary learning journals were collected for data analysis. Each student filled a journal entry every day in a period of six days. Data from 330 entries revealed that the sources where students encountered academic words included university lectures, course materials and reference materials. Besides, the journal entries indicated the strategies students used to understand the meanings of the academic words. All the students claimed to look up dictionaries to know the meanings of words. A majority of them used the lexical familiarization strategy to guess the meanings of words from context and social strategy by asking other classmates/friends for the meanings of the academic words. The students also reported the employment of cognitive strategy with both written and verbal repetition to remember vocabulary