learning strategy

[michelleliu]

hi everyone,

now I am writing a papaer on learning strategies, especially for vocabulary and reading. Does anyone have the experience of studying stratedies. what should I do to make a research? would you please give me some advice on the questionnaire on strategies and vocabulary. I'm grateful for your help.


Michelle

[fluffyhamster]

Norbert Schmitt has written a fair amount on (vocab) learning strategies (e.g. his paper on Japanese students' 'Vocabulary Learning Strategies' in Schmitt and McCarthy (eds), Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. CUP, 1997. His other book, Vocabulary in Language Teaching (CUP 2000) is also very good and might well be useful for your general purposes).
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASI ... 97-1242247

The reason I mention the co-edited book especially is that I'm pretty sure that he used a questionnaire to get the information from the Japanese students (I'm also pretty sure that the full questionnaire appears somewhere in the book, possibly as an appendix following the chapter itself. I'll check when I get home and get back to you soon about this).

I've copied his details from the Uni of Nottingham website (because you might have problems with their server):

Norbert Schmitt
BA (Gonzaga) MEd (Temple) MPhil (Swansea) PhD (Nottingham)

Lecturer in Modern English Language

Personal Profile
Teaching Interests
Research Interests and Publications
Contact Information

Personal Profile:

I began my career as an EFL teacher in Japan and quickly became interested in how language learners acquire their second (or more) languages. During my Masters study, I began researching how they learn vocabulary in particular. This interest extended through my PhD research at Nottingham, and upon completion of my degree I was pleased to join the two prominent vocabulary specialists already on staff (Professor Ronald Carter and Professor Michael McCarthy) as a colleague. Although I continue to research second language vocabulary acquisition, my interests have broadened to all aspects of lexical study, including vocabulary testing, phraseology and formulaic sequences, and corpus-based research.

Teaching Interests:

Post-graduate teaching:

PhD:

I continue to supervise a number of PhD students who focus their research on lexical issues. Current students are exploring issues such as:

The development of new measures of vocabulary depth of knowledge
The development of a vocabulary size test for the Malaysian context
Vocabulary learning strategies used in China
The interrelationship of the various types of word knowledge
The relationship between textbook materials and vocabulary size in Jordan
Teaching methodology in Saudi Arabia.

MA:

In conjunction with the School of Education, I co-direct the MA in English Language Teaching at the University of Nottingham. Within this program, I teach the core module Applied Linguistics in autumn, which provides students with a background in SLA and also provides a overview of the different areas of Applied Linguistics, such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. In the spring, I offer the elective module Vocabulary: Teaching and Learning, which provides a broad introduction to lexical studies.

Undergraduate teaching:

Although the majority of my work is directed towards postgraduate studies, I also convene Introduction to English Language Teaching, which provides students with the background necessary to begin to plan courses and develop teaching materials. It would be a useful module for any student considering ELT as a career, or if they wished to pursue part-time work during international travels.

In addition, I contribute lectures to the 1 st year Language and Context and the 2 nd year Investigating English Language modules, as well as offering teacher-trainer seminars for international visiting scholars.

Research Interests:

Within the broad scope of lexical studies, I am currently engaged in a cycle of research into the nature of formulaic sequences in English. These are strings of words which seem to be stored and processed as whole 'chunks' rather than sequences of individual words (e.g. to make a long story short, on the other hand). Our research centre focusing on language issues (Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics – CRAL) received an £80,000 grant to research these sequences. We have now finished a series of seven studies which will published by John Benjamins Press. I will now begin to collaborate on a new series of studies with Prof. Geoffrey Underwood from our Psychology department, and a number international colleagues, and from this with produce a monograph in which I hope to re-examine previous research in light of the results from our most current investigations.

Other research includes consulting on the development of a Danish National Vocabulary Test, the development of a vocabulary test to guide readers to the proper level of graded reader in the Cambridge University Press series, and the exploration of what percentage of vocabulary is required to comprehend reading texts (in conjunction with Bill Grabe – University of Northern Arizona).

Publications:

Forthcoming publications:

The Acquisition, Processing, and Use of Formulaic Sequences . In press. Edited volume. John Benjamins Press.

"Formulaic Sequences in Action: An Introduction". In press. In N. Schmitt (ed.) The Acquisition, Processing, and Use of Formulaic Sequences. Co-authored with Ronald Carter.

"Knowledge and Acquisition of Formulaic Sequences: A Longitudinal Study". In press. In N. Schmitt (ed.) The Acquisition, Processing, and Use of Formulaic Sequences. Co-authored with Zoltán Dörnyei, Svenja Adolphs, and Valerie Durow.

"Are Corpus-derived Recurrent Clusters Psycholinguistically Valid?" In press. In N. Schmitt (ed.) The Acquisition, Processing, and Use of Formulaic Sequences. Co-authored with Sarah Grandage and Svenja Adolphs.

"The Eyes have It: An Eye-Movement Study into the Processing of Formulaic Sequences". In press. In N. Schmitt (ed.) The Acquisition, Processing, and Use of Formulaic Sequences. Co-authored with Geoffrey Underwood and Adam Galpin.

"Exploring the Processing of Formulaic Sequences through a Self-Paced Reading Task". In press. In N. Schmitt (ed.) The Acquisition, Processing, and Use of Formulaic Sequences. Co-authored with Geoffrey Underwood.

"Vocabulary Coverage in Spoken Genres." In press. Leiden Vocabulary Proceedings. Co-authored with Svenja Adolphs.

"Lexical Coverage of Spoken Discourse". In press. Applied Linguistics. Co-authored with Svenja Adolphs.

"Current Trends in Vocabulary Learning and Teaching". In press. In J. Cummins and C. Davison (eds.) Handbook of English Language Teaching. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Selected Publications

"Derivative Word Forms: What do Learners Know?" 2002. TESOL Quarterly 36 , 2. Co-author ed with Cheryl Zimmerman.

An Introduction to Applied Linguistics. 2002. Edward Arnold Press.

"An Overview of Applied Linguistics". 2002. Co-authored with Marianne Celce-Murcia. In N. Schmitt (ed.) An Introduction to Applied Linguistics. 2002. Edward Arnold Press.

"Developing and Exploring the Behaviour of Two New Versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test". 2001. Language Testing 18, 1. Co-authored with Diane Schmitt and Caroline Clapham.

"Lexical Phrases in Language Learning". 2000. The Language Teacher 24, 8. Co-authored with Ron Carter.

"The Lexical Advantages of Narrow Reading for Second Language Learners". 2000. TESOL Journal 91. Co-authored with Ron Carter.

Vocabulary in Language Teaching. 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"Native and Nonnative Intuitions of Word Frequency". 1999. Second Language Research 15, 2. Co-authored with Bruce Dunham.

"The Relationship between TOEFL Vocabulary Items and Meaning, Association, Collocation, and Word Class Knowledge". 1999. Language Testing 16, 2.

"Quantifying Word Association Responses: What is Nativelike?". 1998. System 26.

"Measuring Collocational Knowledge: Key Issues and an Experimental Assessment Procedure". 1998. I.T.L. Review of Applied Linguistics 119-120.

"Tracking the Incremental Acquisition of Second Language Vocabulary: A Longitudinal Study". 1998. Language Learning 48, 2.

Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, and Pedagogy. 1997. Co-edited with M. McCarthy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

"Vocabulary Learning Strategies". In Schmitt and McCarthy (eds.). 1997.

"Researching Vocabulary through a Word Knowledge Framework: Word Associations and Verbal Suffixes". 1997. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 19, 1. Co-authored with Paul Meara.

Contact Information

School of English Studies
University of Nottingham,
University Park,
Nottingham NG7 2RD.

Email:

[email protected]
Last revised: 25/11/03

You might find these threads interesting:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2716
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=1754
(the latter thread link has details of a book by a guy named Folse, but I don't think it's as good/useful as the above CUP ones).

Hope none of this is too old hat to you.