A survey study on the vocabulary learning strategies used by secondary high English proficiency students in south Iraq

الملخص EN

This study was designed to identify the level of Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLSs) used by English high proficient students at Al-Mutamayizeen Secondary school for boys in the south part of Iraq and the most and least frequently used strategies employed by those students.

categories that were investigated in the questionnaire it was found that the strategies were employed at amedium level.

Strategies in the metacognitive category were the most frequently used, while the strategies in the cognitive category were the least often used ones.

The main themes that emerged from the questionnaire data and from the open question data with the students included students having unclear ideas about what VLSs are and lack of the use of social and semantic network strategies.

Also, the participants were more interested in paying attention to English speakers and contextual clues.

Other key findings included the usage of other strategies most frequently to learn vocabulary were not mentioned in the questionnaire such as using social networks to interact in English with others , playing games in English, and listening songs with lyrics.

Also we can assume that finding 'Metacognitive strategies' as most frequently used by the Al_ Mutamayizeen high proficient students in English indicate that high proficient finally, the results showed a significant linkages between the proficient students use of VLSs and their beliefs about the usefulness of these strategies.

31 secondary students participated in this study, their ages were between 15 and 16 years old.

Based on the findings from the students‟ questionnaires, Al - Mutamayizeen students were found to be medium near to be high strategy users with a mean score of 3.00.

For all the