Studying English vocabulary is considered a hard work for most Chinese EFL students. Most of the students think it’s difficult and not enjoyable. Chinese students are most likely to use some Chinese-learning strategies to pick up their English vocabulary. It’s so natural that many Chinese English-teaching teachers in Taiwan cannot stop it from happening. Perhaps, Chinese English-teaching teachers are possibly afraid that the student’s native language, Chinese, could interfere the second language learning process. However, the researcher thinks of the learning techniques he learned English vocabulary all the way back to his high school time. High school students also more or less used the similar learning strategies. In the beginning, they usually used Chinese phoneticsㄅ ㄆ ㄇ ㄈto replace KK phonetics. For young learners, teachers might use the shape of alphabet to memorize letters such as arrow A, hamburger B, cookie C, big belly D …and so on. So far, these learning strategies still exist up to date and are very popular and welcome in Taiwan, which means they are beneficial or effective to English beginning learners. Since we cannot stop these learning strategies as time goes by for such a long time, how can we make best use of them to help the students in Taiwan? The reason why Chinese students tend to use graph to memorize English letters and vocabulary could be attributed to Chinese ideographical script (Chen, 2005). Young people tend to learn with visual aids such as graphics. Using graphics for students can provide the framework to help them analyze the key topics and interconnect them (Gallagher, 2005).Therefore, there must be something teachers can do to find out whether there are any Chinese ideologies that can be transferred and applied for promoting the memorization of English words.
In Taiwan, English classes provided to elementary school students are 2 hours or less in a week. Most of the English teachers have gone to workshops or training lessons to learn how to do a better job in such a limited time. But, those trainers in the workshops or seminars had only experiences in teaching English in universities, or were native speakers who only had ESL, not EFL, teaching experiences and their different culture backgrounds could not solve the problems we face in Taiwan. It will be significant if English-teaching teachers in Taiwan know how to develop English vocabulary-learning strategies among their students, especially integrating with their Chinese character-learning skills before they can introduce these study methods to their students. Marsh el al. (1981) indicates that the best way for beginning learners to memorize foreign words is through visual word shapes or spelling owing to their limited foreign language vocabulary and the lack of pronunciation knowledge. At the same time, high achievement performance learners use more whole-word strategies (Marsh, Friedman, Desberg & Saterdahl, 1981), which are more similar to Chinese word recognition. Besides, sight-word strategies also make low performance L2 learners memorize vocabulary more efficiently than only using English phonemic awareness. Hsieh (1995) found that English beginning learners rely more on word shape while intermediate and advanced learners rely more on meanings to read words.
For students in the elementary schools of Taiwan, they tend to recognize a Chinese character based on its radical to associate its meaning. But, it’s not easy to do the same in English. In other words, if the students can associate English letter shapes and their possible meanings for English word recognition, they can probably learn English words similar to the way they learn Chinese.
