The Development Of Productive Lexical Competence In Written Discourse In Classroom Instruction Settings

Lexical competence, especially productive lexical competence has a direct impact on second language learners' communicative competence. However, research in productive vocabulary and productive lexical competence has not received its due attention so far, thus resulting in the serious neglect of its study. The current study explored how Chinese college English learners' productive lexical competence developed in classroom instruction settings along five dimensions (i.e., word richness, derivational affixes, lexical collocations, appropriateness as well as compensation strategies) by examining their written discourse in order to reveal: (1) the development process and characteristics of the five aspects of productive lexical competence; and (2) the overall development pattern of productive lexical competence. Altogether 252 subjects from grade one to grade four participating in this study were required to write a composition in order to elicit their written production, then the valid compositions were input into the computer and established four written corpora for each grade. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed to analyze the data in the hope of disclosing a comparatively complete picture of the development process of productive lexical competence.The findings of the present study demonstrated the development process and features of the five dimensions of subjects' productive lexical competence from grade one to grade four. Firstly, subjects' word richness improved greatly from freshmen to sophomores but slid back slightly from sophomores to seniors except their consistent progress at LFP (lexical frequency profile). Secondly, subjects made more derivational affix errors, especially overuse and confusion of noun suffixes from grade one to grade two and then fewer after grade two. Thirdly, lexical collocation errors decreased greatly from freshmen to sophomores and then increased moderately from sophomores to seniors. Besides, errors of verb plus noun collocations remained the largest for all subjects. Fourthly, subjects made fewer appropriateness errors from grade one to grade two and then slightly more after grade two, and they made most inappropriate use of nouns. Fifthly, subjects employed less literal translation strategy and more other four types of compensation strategies (i.e., synonym, approximation, circumlocution and word coinage) from grade one to grade four. Sixthly, the five dimensions of productive lexical competence developed nonlinearly or spirally from grade one to grade four and were also accompanied by a plateau or fossilization in the process of their...