CHALLENGES IN ENGLISH VOCABULARY LEARNING AND MEMORY STRATEGY AS A CONSOLIDATING SOLUTION FOR VIETNAMESE STUDENTS OF ENGLISH MAJOR AT NGUYEN TAT THANH UNIVERSITY IN VIETNAM

This paper investigates the challenges faced by one class of second-year English major students at the Department of Foreign Languages, Nguyen Tat Thanh University, Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, in learning English vocabulary, their consolidating strategy solutions, limitations and thereby puts forwards some possible solutions. The qualitative approach has been used to ensure the validity of the research. 37 Vietnamese subjects from the class participated in the research, answering 37 questionnaires with 23 close questions on their attitudes, difficulties in learning vocabulary, the consolidating strategies they have used and 1 open question for further information. The result reveals that only nearly half of the students have used Memory Strategy with various sub-types developed by Schmitt (1997) to consolidate their English vocabulary when facing difficulties in learning it as they may think that they could utilize other strategies such as cognitive, metacognitive, social strategy beside this strategy. Besides, a lot of Memory Strategy’s sub-types have not been frequently, even rarely used, unascertained or even never used by about half of the students in this study. This may be due to the lecturer’s teaching method, the students’ English capability, their attitude, motivation in learning English vocabulary and the lack of some necessary academic activities from the University to stimulate them. Abbreviation: TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), n. (noun), v. (verb), adj. (adjective), adv. (adverb)