Yoshimitsu Kudo
University of Hawai`i at Manoa

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The purpose of this research was to describe vocabulary learning strategies and to systematically categorize those strategies. To these ends, in a first study, data were collected from Japanese senior high school students (N=325) in a questionnaire in which participants answered the frequency of 56 strategies. Descriptive statistics indicated that many strategies were infrequently used. Factor analysis was performed as a measure to validate the questionnaire. It indicated that four categories (i.e., memory, cognitive, social, and metacognitive) loaded rather clearly and were found to be reasonably reliable, and three items that did not fit into each of them were eliminated. In the second study, again, Japanese senior high school students participated (N=504). Descriptive statistics indicated that the means of each category declined compared to Study 1 probably because the items with high means had been eliminated. Although reliability estimates for each category were reasonably high, factor analysis produced different results for validity because memory and cognitive strategies loaded in one factor, and social and metacognitive strategies loaded in another factor and were named a psycholinguistic factor. Two phenomena turned out to be congruent with past research. One was that cognitively demanding strategies such as keyword method were unpopular whereas cognitively shallower ones such as verbal repetition were popular, which may be attributed to participants' cognitive maturity. The other was that the categories turned out to be consistent with Oxford's (1990) classification based on her research conducted in Alabama and thus strategy use may be culture-free.