Abstract

The present study aimed at investigating the Bhutanese rural and urban secondary students’ English vocabulary size, vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) in practice, and the relationship between the two. The participants were 200 students (110 males and 90 females) from 11 to 16 years old from two different schools in Bhutan, 100 from each school. Adopting the quantitative approach, a comparative design in particular, a previously used vocabulary size test and questionnaire were modified to collect the data. The results revealed that the student-participants on average were medium VLS users and had achieved 83.16% vocabulary coverage of the 3000 most frequently used English words. However, there existed a significant difference in both vocabulary size and VLS in practice between rural and urban participants. As for the choice of VLS, although participants' responses to items on VLS showed slightly different mean values, the general pattern of the responses revealed students in the selected context most frequently used the cognitive strategies and least often the determination strategies which showed the best correlation (r=0.57, p < 0.01) with vocabulary size. Implications for practice and recommendations for future research were drawn based on the findings.