A Study On Lexical Acquisition Of Chinese Learners At Confucius Institutes In Australia

Vocabulary is the core element of language,and the effect of vocabulary acquisition determines the overall development level of second language acquisition to some extent.Nowadays the majority of those who study Chinese as a second language has been shifted to be overseas learners in non-target language environments.Thus,exploring unique features of their Chinese vocabulary acquisition is of important value and significance for international Chinese education.Literature review found that the existing research is often limited to the static description of vocabulary knowledge,with vocabulary acquisition being attributed to the result of learner’s step-by-step acquisition of static vocabulary knowledge.Few studies systematically focus on the dynamic development of vocabulary knowledge or its complex interactions between the internal and external elements.Originated from the Complex Dynamic Theory and Usage-Based Language Theory,a new usage-based dynamic language theory is constructed as the theoretical basis of this study,whih takes Chinese learners from Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms in Australia as the research objects,and conducts dynamic and in-depth investigations from the following three aspects:the development of receptive vocabulary,the development of productive vocabulary,and the interaction between their internal and external elements in language acquisition.The research focuses on three questions:1)What are the characteristics of receptive vocabulary of Chinese learners studying at the Australian Confucius institutes and classrooms at different developing stages of language acquisition?2)What are the characteristics of productive vocabulary of the Chinese learners studying at the Australian Confucius institutes and classrooms at different developing stages of language acquisition?3)How are the various elements of lexical acquisition correlated to each other in the process of productive vocabulary development?This research conducted two empirical studies to answer these three questions.In the first empirical study,the researcher selected three groups of one hundred learners in total,respectively at elementary,intermediate,and advanced levels,from three Confucius Institutes of Australian universities and adopted synchronic vocabulary tests to investigate their breadth and depth of receptive vocabulary.The second empirical study was conducted to investigate the breadth and richness of productive vocabulary in learners’ freely produced corpus via 21-week tracking on eight Chinese beginners from the Confucius classrooms at two middle schools in Australia.Based on statistical analysis as well as a series of dynamic analyzing methods,i.e.,moving min-max graph,Monte Carlo simulation,moving correlation,we have drawn the following research conclusions:1.The characteristics of receptive vocabulary of Chinese learners in Australian Confucius Institute at different stages of acquisition.The development of learner’s receptive vocabulary size has been significantly developed in the three different acquisition stages,but the increase from intermediate to advanced is smaller than that from elementary to intermediate.Vocabularies of different word levels have different development characteristics at different stages of acquisition.The initial acquisition state of first-level vocabulary is the best,but then the development of intermediate vocabulary always has an advantage.The development of semantically opaque vocabulary has obvious word frequency effects.The development of high-frequency semantic opaque words is firstly fast and then slows down,and the development of low-frequency semantic opaque words is firstly slow and then fast.In the acquisition of vocabulary depth,there is an obvious imbalance between semantic knowledge and collocation knowledge,in which the former develops better and faster than the latter.With the improvement of learners’language level,such imbalance will be gradually weakened or even close to vanishing point.Receptive vocabulary size has a high positive correlation with both semantic knowledge and collocation knowledge within vocabulary depth,but the former proves a stronger relationship.2.The characteristics of productive vocabulary of Chinese learners in Australian Confucius Institutes at different stages of acquisition and development.The overall development of learner’s productive vocabulary size has shown a relatively obvious increase,but the development process has shown a non-linear development trend of slow at both ends and fast in the middle.While individual differences in development trajectories are significant.Learners with better initial conditions tend to enter the active development stage earlier,but fall into a standstill earlier likewise.The development of lexical density showed an overall downward trend,but the rate of decline was firstly fast and then into a lag phase.Learners with lower language proficiency always produce a higher lexical density than those with better language proficiency,and the development variation is also stronger than the latter.The overall type-token radio(TTR)is on a slow upward trend.On the contrary,TTR of learners with lower initial language proficiency gets more significant development.The development of lexical sophistication is generally on the rise,and learners with higher initial language proficiency are more stable in development and have fewer system variations.3.The dynamic correlation among the elements in the productive vocabulary acquisition of Chinese learners in Australian Confucius Institutes.Within the social network learning behavior,the interaction between learners and teachers gradually decreases,while the interaction between learners and between learners and resources gradually increases.Within the productive vocabulary richness,lexical density and type-token radio(TTR)have developed from a highly negative correlation to a highly positive correlation,while lexical density and lexical sophistication have developed from a highly positive correlation to a moderate negative correlation and then back to a high positive correlation.The correlation between TTR and lexical sophistication is highly positive at the beginning and end,but there are violent fluctuations in the middle.The vocabulary size and social network behavior showed a stable and highly positive correlation in the first half,and the correlation in the second half declined and finally showed zero correlation.Vocabulary size and lexical richness also tend to zero correlation eventually.Social network behavior and lexical density are competitively negatively correlated throughout the entire process,but the strength of the negative correlation is dynamically changing.The relationship between social network behavior and TTR has changed from a stable high positive correlation to a high negative correlation.The correlation between social network behavior and lexical sophistication is expressed as a fluctuation curve from a high degree of negative correlation to a high degree of positive correlation to a high degree of negative correlation.Usage-based dynamic language theory in SLA proposed in this research believes that language communication is an important way of lexical acquisition for second language learners,and static vocabulary knowledge is dynamically developed in communication and language use.This is a new interpretation of lexical acquisition in SLA,and it has a certain theoretical innovation.In addition,the study uses a series of dynamic analysis methods to systematically explore the dynamic characteristics of the receptive and productive vocabulary development of the Chinese learners of the Australian Confucius Institute and dynamic correlations among various elements during lexical acquisition by using a combination of synchronic and diachronic research methods.This kind of analysis that takes into account the overall and the individual,the dynamic and the static,the macro and the micro is still rare in previous studies,which is a brand new attempt in this field.The research conclusions also have certain reference and application value for international Chinese language education.Teachers can better understand the stability and fluctuations in lexical acquisition,recognize the important role of language use in the construction of language knowledge,and give full attention to individual differences in a learning group.