Analysis of Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Vocabulary Size: A Comparative Study of Iranian English and Non-English Major Students

This study sought to explore the interrelationship of vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) and vocabulary size (VS) across five different university majors of ShahidBahonar university of Kerman in Iran. To this end, a VLS questionnaire developed specifically for Iranian context by SoodmandAfshar, Ketabi and Tavakoli (2010) and a VS test by Schmitt (2001) were utilized. The participants were 190 BA students majoring in Engineering, Medicine, Basic Sciences, Humanities (non English majors), and English as Foreign Language (EFL). The results revealed that the order of VLS use between all the majors was the same. This order, set from the most to least frequently used strategies, is as follows; Memory, cognitive, determination, metacognitive, and social strategies. Moreover, no significant difference was found between English and non English majors regarding their VLS use. Furthermore, it was found that English majors VLS could not predict their VS while non English majors VLS, especially metacognitive strategy, could highly predict their VS. In addition,the results concerning predictive ability of major indicated that major was a predictor of students VS but not VLS. The researcher hopes that the results of this study will be advantageous to English language teachers at university levels in order to reach a better understanding of vocabulary learning trends of students from different majors and the drawbacks of the existing common methods so that they can more