Investigating Students’ Perceptions of Vocabulary Instruction Strategies

Abstract

Despite being one of the pillars of learning any language, lexical knowledge has always been a challenge for foreign language learners. The present study seeks to uncover the attitudes of first year students of English towards implicit and explicit vocabulary learning strategies and to identify the challenges encountered when learning English vocabulary. The study mainly relies on a questionnaire taken by a selected sample of 46 first year students at the Department of English, Constantine 1 University during the academic year 2022/2023. The results reveal that the participants have positive attitudes towards explicit and implicit vocabulary teaching strategies. Participants mentioned some difficulties when learning new words and provided their strategies to learn them.  Concerning the explicit strategy, only a few of the respondents are familiar with the branch of etymology as a vocabulary teaching strategy while almost 94% of them are not. As for the implicit strategy, most of the participants displayed poor inferencing skills despite their appreciation of context clue tasks.