A Study Of Chinese Fl Learners’ English Vocabulary Development In Oral Production

Ever since Meara (1980) called for new research into foreign language (L2) lexical acquisition and use, a vast number of studies have been devoted to vocabulary acquisition in the foreign languages. However, few of them are related to productive vocabulary acquisition in oral production, which represents a serious drawback.The present study aims to investigate into L2oral productive vocabulary in the foreign language classroom setting. A conceptual framework was constructed drawing on existing theories concerning the full range of language production and cognitive skills to describe Chinese EFL learners’oral productive vocabulary and its development. Eleven voluntary students’oral productions were elicited on three occasions during their three semesters of English learning at the university. The description of oral productive vocabulary covers word diversity, word knowledge and on-line processing ability. Comparison results of lexical indices reveal the following major findings:(1) The general results of word diversity gave an impression of group gain:(a) the subjects developed their oral productive vocabulary in indices of word tokens, word types, the lexical frequency profile and lexical density, although they relied more on high frequency words than on any other frequency levels to accomplish the oral task;(b) The subjects did not show much difference in their employment of the basic3000words, but they made significant improvement at the low frequency level, i.e., the beyond3000-word level;(c) The fluctuation nature of lexical variation could be expounded by the fact that the subjects at Time Two showed the highest frequency of self-repairs and productive strategies. The verbosity of speech may artificially inflate the number of lexical tokens and reduce the type/token ratio.(2) Significant progresses of grammatical behavior were found in the indices of the past-tense marking and the plurality marking, but the subjects did not advance significantly in the indices of the copula structure and article use. The manifestations of the subjects’grammatical behavior in the three tests indicated that the transition from the habit of Chinese lexical specifications to that of the English was a process of struggling for shaking-off L1influence while the complexity and interweaving of similarities as well as differences in the lexical specifications between L1and L2made it a long-standing problem.(3) The subject’s correct phonetic frequencies on phonology significantly increased, while erroneous phonetic frequencies and phonological repair frequencies significantly reduced. The qualitative analysis indicated that instant-repair, retraced-repair and fresh-starts were employed to guarantee language appropriateness. Some phonological knowledge of low frequency words did not develop as the concept knowledge and the phonological errors were associated with the intended words in phonological link or sound resemblance.(4) The subjects manifested strong awareness of self-repairs in the three tests, either overt repairs at linguistic level or covert repairs at non-linguistic level, indicating the hidden psycholinguistic behaviors in speaking. These results indicated the subjects’cognitive development and on-line allocation of cognitive resources. Presumably, the oral task was cognitively demanding, and the subjects benefited from the adopting repairs to hold the speech floor. There were so many factors competing for the cognitive resources, and these had a great influence on the language production. As a result, when on-line pressure was overdone, it was impossible for the subjects to monitor and correct all errors.(5) The subjects at Time One, with limited resources, used more high frequency words and adopted less frequent strategies. They displayed the highest strategic frequency at Time Two, which were postulated as the trial-and-error stage. Armed with more procedural knowledge of the L2, the subjects on the third occasion adopted a smaller number of productive strategies than on the first two occasions to accomplish the oral task. Pearson Correlation analysis suggests that the relationship between subjects’strategic frequency and lexical frequency seems to be independent on the three occasions. The subjects employed all subindices of achievement strategies and avoidance strategy at Time One and Time Two. As they progressed in the target language, they tended to abandon the coinage strategy and avoidance strategy. In this sense, proficient learners outperformed less proficient ones in terms of strategy use, not in number but in type.The development of English learners’ oral productive vocabulary in the classroom environment bears the characteristics of multi-dimension and imbalance. The non-linguistic devices, namely, self-repair behavior and productive strategies were employed to guarantee language accuracy and to compensate for their linguistic deficiency. Based on the findings of the current study, the author holds that classroom teaching should help L2learners free themselves from the influence of LI knowledge system and facilitate the reorganization of the L2mental lexicon, and guide them to adopt productive strategies to accomplish the communicative task successfully, while emphasizing the imparting of language knowledge. Besides, enough attention should be paid to language errors and their correction. Otherwise, L2learners will take them for granted, which accordingly will results in fossilization.