The Process Of Productive Vocabulary Fossilization And The Possible Causes

Vocabulary learning is important to the native and non-native learners. It is regarded as an essential building block of language. Nation (1990) divided the vocabulary into two categories: receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. The former refers to the vocabulary that one could understand in the listening and reading activities, while the latter refers to the vocabulary that one uses in the speaking and writing. Only the learners' vocabulary ability has researched certain level, they could understand and use the language correctly.But in the process of vocabulary learning, influenced by the language environment, language level, cognitive style, psychological factors, learning strategies, and many other factors, the learners' vocabulary development couldn't progress fast as the initial stages, and hovered in a state of stagnation and even decline in some degree. The specific performance: low ability of productive vocabulary, frequent use of high-frequency words, and the choice of monotonous words. In other words, the ability of receptive and productive couldn't develop simultaneously and it seems to be fossilized in some level. This is a common phenomenon in the vocabulary development of second language learners.This paper researches the process of vocabulary development of the university students by quantitative research methods. The grade 1-3 students of English major are the subject of the major. The paper is to investigate the development of receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary and depth of productive knowledge at different stages of learning and their relationships at different stages of learning.First of all, Schmitt et al.(2001)'s vocabulary level test is used to measure the size of receptive vocabulary., then RANGE (Nation2001a) is used to analyze the distribution of the word frequency. It includes three basic words list, the first 2000 high frequency word family, and the 570 academic word families. This software deal with the input test by cooperating with the three lists, then give the information of richness of the writing in the output tests. The third test tools are word association test designed by Read (1998), used to measure the depth of vocabulary knowledge. The data from the above test will be analyze by the SPSS11.5 software, to do the descriptive statistics and one-way ANOVA, and correlation analysis, statistical significant level set at .05.Major findings: RVS progress in a linear pattern from year one to year three. The subjects increased their RVS significantly in every year. But the increase rate is slow. Comparing the receptive vocabulary, the development of productive vocabulary is slower. In the development period of the second year, there exists fossilization phenomenon. The depth of vocabulary knowledge improve too from freshman to sophomore, but the development stagnate as the subjects move from year two to year three. As to the relationship between RVS, PVS and DVK, their relationship correlates significantly at the three different learning stages.In the final part of the paper, it discuss the causes that lead to the productive vocabulary fossilization, and some teaching and learning methods are suggested to reduce the happening of the fossilization.