A Preliminary Study on Vocabulary Learning Strategies Used by the Students from the Faculty of Accountancy

Communication is almost important without words.Learners with limited vocabulary face difficulties in conveying their messages to others.Therefore, they should acquire enough words to communicate their ideas in L2.Besides, knowing the right strategies to acquire words is also important to help learners in their study.Because of that, the study aims to unveil the usefulness of vocabulary learning strategies among students from the faculty of Accountancy in a public university in northern Malaysia.52 participants (44 female and 8 male) from this faculty participated in the study.From the total of 52 participants, 30 are from the Diploma in Accountancy and the remaining 22 are the students from Diploma in Accounting Information System.The study focuses on second language vocabulary learning acquisition.Participants were asked to answer questionnaires during normal class time.The questionnaire contains seven questions on vocabulary learning strategies where participants had to choose the four options given from 'very useful' to 'not useful at all' based on their L2 study experience on their L2 vocabulary learning process.The findings show that learners preferred to communicate, read books and listen to English songs in order to acquire vocabulary.In addition, they also acquire vocabulary explicitly from their daily routine activities.These suggest that lecturers should focus more on explicit teaching vocabulary because previous research shows that this strategy helps learners in their vocabulary acquisition.