VOCABULARY LEARNING STRATEGIES AS PREDICTORS OF ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS

This study examined the relationship between vocabulary learning strategies and academic performance in secondary school students. A survey was conducted to a sample of 267 Grade 10 students from five public secondary schools in the District of New Corella, Division of Davao del Norte. It employed stratified random sampling to select respondents from the chosen schools so that each has an appropriate percentage of distribution of student respondents based on ratio and proportion. Adapted questionnaires were used to determine the level of vocabulary learning strategies and the researcher utilized the third quarter grades of the five schools in the district. The ethnicity shows that the total respondents are overwhelmingly Bisaya. The respondents are in the lowest income category, which suggests a clear bias toward constrained financials.  Among the five indicators, determination strategies turned out to be the most often used, and social strategies were the least effective. However, the English grades of the students demonstrate a clustering of their scores around the average. There is no strong evidence to support the claim that there are differences in average English grades among the ethnic groups being compared, while there is no significant difference in the mean English grades among the four income categories. It is recommended that students should actively use effective vocabulary learning strategies to enhance their academic performance across subjects and that teachers design customized vocabulary acquisition. Thus, the administrators and school principals may monitor the implementation of vocabulary learning strategies to improve academic performance.