Vocabulary learning : A study of students’ and teachers' attitudes towards English vocabulary learning in lower secondary school

The aim of this paper was to investigate student and teacher attitudes towards English vocabulary learning and teaching. Secondary aims were to find out how a number of students learn new vocabulary and whether teachers prefer explicit or implicit teaching methods. The investigation was conducted by letting 75 students in two lower secondary schools and 24 teachers of English from different schools answer questionnaires about vocabulary learning and vocabulary teaching. The results show that both the students and the teachers generally had positive attitudes towards vocabulary learning. The teachers of English did not prefer explicit teaching methods to implicit teaching methods when teaching vocabulary, but they thought implicit vocabulary teaching to be most effective. The results also show that the students claim to learn new vocabulary in varied ways and watching English movies or TV-series and by playing computer- or video games were singled out as the most effective ways to acquire new vocabulary by the students. Hence, the results show that both the teachers and the students agreed on implicit vocabulary learning to be the most effective, however, previous research has shown that vocabulary is most effectively learnt explicitly.