A Cross-sectional Study On Word Meaning And Collocation In Second Language Vocabulary Knowledge Acquisition

Based on a vocabulary knowledge framework put forward by Richards and Nation, the present study investigates the development of the depth of the vocabulary knowledge. This study investigates how Chinese EFL learners at three different EFL proficiency levels acquire 2 types of vocabulary knowledge, namely meaning and collocation, both receptively and productively.Seventy-five Chinese EFL university learners were tested on their receptive and productive mastery of the 2 types of vocabulary knowledge for each of the 8 high frequency words we chose as the test words. The following findings were obtained in the present study: 1) Generally speaking, the subjects' total vocabulary knowledge highly correlates with their EFL proficiency levels both receptively and productively, which suggests a concurrent development in the depth of vocabulary knowledge. 2) The subjects' vocabulary knowledge, on the whole, correlates with their vocabulary size. However, this does not suggest that a larger vocabulary size necessarily ends up with a deeper vocabulary knowledge. 3) There is a wide gap between the subjects' receptive knowledge and productive knowledge of the two types of vocabulary knowledge, which may be due to both cognitive aspects and outside input in EFL learning. 4) Meaning knowledge increases quickly at low proficiency levels while collocation knowledge develops faster at higher proficiency levels.Firstly, this study tries to account for the developmental characteristics and patterns both from cognitive aspects of learning and from the learning environment, and gives some suggestions for EFL vocabulary teaching. 1) Cognitively, the study of EFL vocabulary is quite different from the acquisition of native language vocabulary. Learners tend to pay more attention to the meaning aspect when they study words in their native language. However, when they encounter new words in a foreign language, they usually pay attention to both their forms and meanings. Because learners usually rely to a great extent on their native language in establishing the semantic system in a foreign language, they tend to pay more attention to the forms of the new words they encounter in their EFL study. However, when dealing with EFL high frequency words, they may shift their attention back to the meaning aspect of those words since the forms of those words are already quite familiar to them. By doing so, they quickly increase their knowledge even at an early stage of EFL study. That is the reason why meaning knowledge increasesquickly at the low proficiency level. 2) In the outside environment for EFL learning in China, we have emphasized too much on the simple expansion of learners' second language vocabulary size while less attention has been paid to the quality of vocabulary study. This is likely to lead to the difficulty in establishing an effective semantic network among EFL learners and to the unbalanced development between the receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. For the subjects at two lower proficiency levels, their external EFL input and chances of EFL production are extremely limited compared with the seniors at Level Three. This may, to a certain extent, account for the wide gap between Level Three and those two lower levels both receptively and productively.Secondly, this study, based on the experimental results, gives the following suggestions on meanings and collocations in the second language vocabulary teaching: 1) Classroom teachers must take a more comprehensive approach to vocabulary development in order for students to reach a higher quality and quantity of L2 output. There are three facets of this complexity: a) receptive versus productive vocabularies, b) breadth versus depth of vocabularies, and c) direct teaching versus contextual inferencing. All the three aspects are quite important and necessary in establishing an effective network of both size and depth of vocabulary knowledge. 2) It is helpful for teachers to know about continua of vocabulary knowledge which are: a) Generalization: being able...