A Study On The Development Of Productive Vocabulary Of International Students In China Of Chinese Majors

The aim of the dissertation is to find the relationship between the various lexical variables in writing and the writing quality.The results indicate that there are some lexical variables can be regarded as key variables which significantly contribute to the prediction of the writing quality.Then research efforts have been made to explore the developments of the key lexical variables in the writings of international students in China of Chinese majors.An attempt is made to explain the possible reasons why some students achieved more success than others in lexical development.Therefore,there are three specific research questions in the dissertation.(1)What is the relationship between the various lexical variables and the writing quality?(2)What is the developmental pattern of thevocabulary in the writings of international students in China of Chinese majors?(3)What is the difference between the successful and unsuccessful learners as far as the development of vocabulary is concerned?Built on the previous theoretical studies of lexical competence,we carry out the study from three dimensions:breadth of lexical knowledge,depth of lexical knowledge and access to lexical items.The breadth of lexical knowledge refers to the words used in a writing including the total words in the text,the words of different parts of speech,the words of different word length,lexical density,lexical diversity,lexical sophistication.The depth of lexical knowledge is how the words are organized focusing on the issue of a writing.Latent semantic analysis is a technique of analyzing semantic relationships between words,based on which the content of a writing can be scored automatically.The access to lexical items refers to the automaticity of lexical retrieval from the perspective of mental lexical properties,such as word concreteness.The research conducts several empirical studies.The first study examines the relationship between the various lexical variables and the writing quality.The data for analysis are 202 compositions of the same title from HSK corpus.The breadth of lexical knowledge is measured via Chinese Text Automatic Analysis System and Guidelines for CLT Materials Development.The access to lexical items is measured via Chinese Text Automatic Analysis System.The technique of Latent Semantic Analysis is utilized in measuring the depth of lexical knowledge.To address the relationship between the various lexical variables and the writing quality,correlations and multiple linear regression are employed.The second study aims to investigate the developmental patterns of lexical competence.The data for analysis are 182 compositions of 91 international students in China of Chinese majors and 69 compositions of the same title written by native Chinese college students.Paired samples T test is employed to examine the developmental patterns of lexical competence of intra-groups.One-way Anova is utilized to examine the developmental patterns of lexical competence of inter-groups.The objective of the third study is to find the difference between the successful and unsuccessful learners.10 students are selected among all students for in-depth interview.5 of them are successful learners who have made greater achievements,while the other 5 are unsuccessful learners who have made less achievements.The theoretical basis of interview questions is the "system of self-regulatory strategies" by Domyei.When designing interview questions,"self-regulating capacity in vocabulary learning scale" by Tseng is taken for reference.The empirical studies yields the following important findings:(1)67.6%of the variance in the scores could be explained by the 6 distinguishing variables in regression analyses.(2)The depth of lexical knowledge did not become the distinguishing variable to predict the writing scores.There are some possible reasons.Second language learners produced limited text length in the timed writing test.Human raters paid more attention to the surface features of language than the content of the composition.(3)5 distinguishing variables except the percentage of adverbs in the second compositions of the group of all learners and low-score group were significantly higher than those in the first compositions.4 distinguishing variables except the percentage of adverbs and fou in the second compositions of mid-score group were significantly higher than those in the first compositions.4 distinguishing variables except the percentage of adverbs and band six vocabulary in the second compositions of high-score group were significantly higher than those in the first compositions.(4)The lexical sophistication is measured by new lexical syllabus of 5000 words.Results show that the percentage of words exceeding the syllabus was much higher than the words of five band and six band.A set of rules were set down to delete those words exceeding syllabus whose lexical difficulty is lower than the words in syllabus.The rules include Lexical forms,lexical semantic,classroom language and proper noun.There is a sharp difference between the words exceeding syllabus before and after deleting the false words exceeding syllabus.For instance,there is 7.44%words exceeding syllabus,and 1.76%of them have higher lexical difficulty than the words in syllabus.(5)Test of within-subjects contrasts show that most learners made the most rapid progress in text length,the least progress in percentage of four-character-word and six band.Test of within-subjects contrasts show that the low-score and mid-score group made slow improvements in text length compared with the high-score group.The low-score group made significant improvements in percentage of four-character-word and five band.There is no significant difference in percentage of four-character-word in the first composition between mid-score and high-score group,however,there is a significant difference in the second composition.There is an obvious contrast between groups of second language learners and native speakers group.Generally speaking,second language learners ought to make more efforts on text length,four-character-word,words exceeding syllabus,adverbs of five band and adverbs exceeding syllabus.(6)Under the learning environment of target language,successful learners are environment-control-oriented while choosing and using various strategies.They make full use of the target language environment,where learn large amount of new vocabulary in authentic settings.The most effective way of learning is to find native speakers as language partners.They communicate half an hour to one hour via writing on Wechat every day.The issues of their common concern show depth of thought.(7)When learning idioms and adverbs,successful learners have meta-language awareness.They are sensitive to the idioms occurring in the articles of history and economy.They identify what should be paid more attention to when learning adverbs by comparing adverbs in different languages.Successful learners make an attempt to use those idioms and adverbs that they already learned during the interaction with the native speakers and accept corrective feedback.The theories of connectionism and interactive alignment can explain why the mid-score and high-score group make success in learning vocabulary.Under the background of big data,we claim that classroom learning environment should mimic learning environment out of classroom.In order to carry out effective vocabulary learning in the writing class,we are encouraged to develop a digital teaching and learning system.