Investigating the Most Frequently Utilized Strategies

Abstract

This study aimed atinvestigating the most frequently utilized vocabulary learning strategies bySudanese university EFL student’s.It attempted to find out the most-used and least-used strategies for learning vocabulary of English language. It adopted the descriptive method. A sample of the study population is represented in 100 university students, participated in the study. A 15-item questionnaire (adapted fromSchmitt’sTaxonomy,1997) wasused in data collection.The Data were analyzed by using frequency, percentages and means. The analysis of the questionnaire's responses shows significant points such as the majority of students never use strategies like monolingual dictionaries (60 %) and making a word list of new vocabulary (63%). Moreover, most of the students least use strategies such as “I ask the teacher for a sentence including the newword” (65%), “I ask classmates for meaning of the word” (62%), “I use bilingual dictionary to find the meaning of new words” (50%),“I study new words through written repetition” (72%)and “I continue to study new words over time” (75%).In contrast, no preferences to particular strategies recorded by the students, although a small number of them mostly prefer strategies including “I ask the teacher to translate the words into Arabic” (20%), “I ask the teacher for a sentence including the newword” (20%), “I use monolingual dictionary to find the meaning of new word” (19%)and “I guess the meaning of new words from the context”.The study is concluded with some recommendations and suggestions for further studies.