A Case Study Of Effects Of Written Output On College English Vocabulary Acquisition: Problems And Analyses

According to Chinese linguists'findings, Chinese college English learners (CCEL) have put much effort into vocabulary learning, yet their English vocabulary proficiency develops slowly. In response, this thesis, based on Swain's output hypothesis (1995), aims at analyzing and finding the problems in their vocabulary acquisition, and aims at finding certain solutions to them.With six English-major sophomores as its subjects and by taking composition and Chinese-English translation as its testing instruments, the present case study involves a deep-going analysis of the written output and interview records by means of abstracting and comparing to discuss the effects of written output on CCEL's vocabulary acquisition from aspects of Swain (1995)'s output hypothesis, i.e. noticing function, hypothesis-testing function and metalinguistic function as well as correlative input and learners'autonomous learning.The major findings of the present study are: Firstly, written output is helpful for CCEL to acquire productive vocabulary knowledge; secondly, it could effectively promote their vocabulary acquisition by combining written output with correlative input; thirdly, training their autonomous learning is the key to significant improvement for their vocabulary acquisition and English proficiency.