Abstract:
he present study aimed at exploring students’ preferences and use of vocabulary learning
strategies at Shino Secondary School. The study tries to answer the following questions .These
are: to what extent students preferred the strategies; how often these strategies where used; is
there any significant differences between preference and use, and what were some of the factors
that hinder students’ uses the strategy as frequently as possible. To achieve these objective, the
research targeted on students and teachers of Shino Secondary school. Concerning the sampling
techniques employed in this study was simple random sampling technique was employed for
both teachers and students. The instruments used to collect data were questionnaires and
interview. Three sets of questionnaires were used to identify the students’ preference and
frequency of use. Besides, the questionnaire was used to find out the major factors that hindered
students ’use of vocabulary learning strategies as frequently as possible as their preference rate in
order to achieve better lexical knowledge. The questionnaires and interview were used
triangulate the data obtained through the questionnaire. Then, as they result indicated majority of
the students have high preference of vocabulary learning strategies. To put the preference rate of
such strategy in descending order: social, memory, compensation, affective, cognitive and Meta
cognitive strategies. On the contrary, these highly preferred strategies were not employed on
other words; the implementations of these strategies are not equivalent to their preference rate.
Even the result showed there is a great difference between students’ preference and frequency of
use except for social strategies. Finally, the major factors that hindered students’ use of these
strategies are lack of awareness of vocabulary learning strategies, little exposure for English
language learning, lack of self encouragement to equip them with lexical knowledge, lack of
experience in using the strategies, lack of EFL teachers support in learning the strategies, fear of
making mistakes, and influence of culture. As a result it is recommended that teachers and
academic (by allowing more time for covering the book) should work together for better
achievement of the students through using vocabulary learning strategies as frequently as
possible.
