A Study Of Lexical Competence Of High Vocational College Students

English teaching in vocational colleges has met several problems with the quick development of vocational college education. Higher requirements are raised for language competence, but on the other hand, English teaching and learning time seems to be reduced. Besides this, students enrolled in vocational college come from more broad range. Thus, it is necessary to study the students' lexical competence in order to improve English teaching and learning in vocational colleges.Most previous researches into L2 vocabulary focused on university students. Few of them paid attention to vocational college students. Thus, the present research made an attempt to study their lexical competence in both breadth acquisition and depth acquisition.Totally, sixty students in Grade One and Grade Two from Wuhan Marine Vocational College participated in the study.For the breadth acquisition study, one hundred and ten word samples from College English Syllabus were classified into 4 levels according to their frequencies of usage. The subjects were required to recognize the meaning of the tested word from four choices. The findings were: The vocabulary size of Grade One students ranges from 1997 to 2350. Grade Two students' vocabulary size ranges from 2750 to 3111. However, the vocabulary size of Grade Two students who are finishing their English subject hasn't met the requirement of vocational college English syllabus.The depth acquisition study investigated within the descriptive framework of word knowledge types (Richards, 2001; Nation, 2004) how 3 types of word knowledge — meaning sense, grammar and collocation were acquired receptively and productively by vocational college students. The following major findings were obtained: (1) Much better receptive mastery than productive mastery and faster...