Assessing The Roles Of Breadth And Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge In Writing In Second Language Acquisition

Vocabulary knowledge is the writers' most important tool. It can be looked at from various dimensions, notably a quantitative and qualitative angle. The former (breadth of knowledge) refers to vocabulary size, or the number of words for which a learner has at least some minimum knowledge of meaning. The latter, depth of vocabulary knowledge, is defined as a learner's level of knowledge of various aspects of a given word. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which depth of vocabulary knowledge, as well as breadth of vocabulary knowledge, is related to writing in second language acquisition. The study is based on the vocabulary knowledge framework proposed by Nation (1990). The research questions that are addressed are as follows:1. How do scores on breadth of vocabulary knowledge and writing correlate with each other?2. How do scores on depth of vocabulary knowledge and writing correlate with each other?3. To what extent does depth of vocabulary knowledge contribute to second language writing and how much is the prediction afforded by vocabulary size?Ninety second year English majors of Yangzhou University were recruited for this study. Two tests used to measure two dimensions of learners' vocabulary knowledge were administered. One was a Vocabulary Size Test, which was used to measure how many words the examinees had. The other was a Depth-of-Vocabulary Test, which was designed to measure two aspects of the depth of vocabulary knowledge: meaning and collocation. The scores, together with the improvement of the subjects' writing skill in TEM 4 in 2003 were collected and analyzed. Pearson correlations and multiple regression were chosen as the dominant techniques for the statistical analyses. SPSS was used to conduct analyses on the data.The results reported that scores on vocabulary size, depth of vocabularyknowledge and writing were highly, and positively, correlated; and scores on depth of vocabulary knowledge made a unique contribution to the prediction of writing skill levels, in addition to the prediction afforded by vocabulary size scores. While meaning is very important, as the present research shows, vocabulary knowledge can no longer be regarded as a simple matter of recognition of superficial word meanings. Vocabulary knowledge not only has breadth, as represented by the number of words known to a learner, but also has depth. Based on the results of the study, at least two components of vocabulary depth need serious attention in order to improve students' writing. First, in addition to primary meanings of words, synonymy and polysemy are also important elements. Second, syntactic properties of words, in particular their collocability and collocational relations with other words, are also well worth students' attention.