Assessment Of Learners' Vocabulary By Tests Of Differing Sensitivity And It's Implication To Language Teaching

Early in this century considerable effort was employed to the studies of the assessment of vocabulary knowledge. Just as there are many things to know about a word - its spoken form, its written form, its inflected and derived forms, its collocations and so on - there are degrees of knowing. The most widely recognized division on a scale of degrees of knowing is the receptive and productive distinction. The receptive vocabulary is commonly considered as the vocabulary for listening and reading, while productive vocabulary as vocabulary for speaking and writing.Early researchers divided learners' vocabulary knowledge into receptive and productive, ignoring the development of vocabulary knowledge. And they came to the conclusion that the learners' receptive vocabulary is larger than their productive vocabulary because in their experiments the learners scores on a receptive test were higher than those on a productive test. This is of little help for us in finding out how learners' vocabulary knowledge developed, and to what degree they have master the vocabulary. In later studies, the notion test sensitivity was introduced, which, to some extent, helps us solve the problem.This paper explores to clarify the traditional ideas about receptive and productive vocabulary acquisition by introducing the theory of test sensitivity in the study. Tests of differing sensitivity require different amount of knowledge. The more sensitive test have distractors that are dissimilar in meaning from each other which makes it 'easier' than a test in which the distractors are from the same semantic areas. And the sensitivity theory can be applied to both receptive and productive tests.With receptive and productive vocabulary tests of differing sensitivity, scores on the more sensitive productive tests can be higher than the less sensitive receptive tests, which shows that the mastering of vocabulary is not a all-or-nothing phenomenon. In the process of learning, learners can master semi-productive vocabulary before precise comprehension of the word. For instance, they may use the word in correct meaning, without the correct word form. By using this theory in the research, we can find out the process of development of learners' vocabulary knowledge and help them activate their semi-productive vocabulary to be used accurately in speaking and writing. Also we can use it for reference in other fields of vocabulary studies.