EFL teachers' perceptions of teaching vocabulary learning strategies

Although 11 years of teaching English as a compulsory subject in state schools in Turkey, students can not achieve their goals in terms of communication or academic purposes. There might be a number of reasons for this issue, however, inappropriate vocabulary teaching seems to be one of the reasons despite the fact that it crucially contributes to language proficiency. Through my teaching experience as an EFL teacher, teachers' approach to vocabulary teaching always drew my attention. Therefore, in this research, it was aimed to investigate Turkish secondary state school EFL teachers' perceptions of teaching Vocabulary Learning Strategies and to explore the most and the least popular strategies regarding usefulness degree and teaching practice among teachers. One hundred Turkish state school EFL teachers from central of Malatya in Turkey participated in this study. Both qualitative and quantitative research design were employed. The results of the research showed that the majority of teachers implement the strategies that they believe useful in their teaching practice. Memory strategies were appeared to be the most popular VLS in this research however; Metacognitive Strategies are more beneficial for gaining independency in learning. On the basis of the results of this research, it can be concluded that expanding teachers' awareness of Metacognitive Strategies might be a key for developing learner autonomy.