Chinese Learners' Productive Academic Vocabulary Knowledge In International Conference Articles

Vocabulary, being an indispensable part of a language, has always gained much attention. Vocabulary is also considered to be the foundation of L2 acquisition and teaching. In recent years, Chinese students are facing more and more opportunities of international academic communication; however, sometimes their academic achievements can not be agreed by the international academia, and their research articles are not accepted by the international conferences and journals. This, in many cases, can be partly ascribed to students'monotonous productive vocabulary and their lack of academic vocabulary knowledge.Many researchers have found out the gap between Second Language students'knowledge of receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. Learners may understand a word when reading, but they can not produce it correctly and effectively in their writings. Academic vocabulary refers to words that occur with high frequency in academic texts but not as frequent in non-academic texts. Researches on academic vocabulary abroad have made considerable progress, whereas studies in this field have not received much attention in China, especially researches probing into Chinese learners'problem of productive academic vocabulary knowledge. Taking graduate students of a Chinese military university as objectives, the present study aims to find out the distance between their productive academic vocabulary knowledge and that of native English scholars'from three aspects, namely meaning, collocation and function. Then the causes of the distinctions are analyzed.Two corpora were built to realize the contrastive analysis. Thirty-one research articles written by graduate students from the military university majoring in computer science were selected to form the learner corpus. Fifty-five research articles written by English native speakers are downloaded from the database of Elsevier and ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) to form the reference corpus. Each corpus contains 60,000 and 380,000 running words. WordSmith and SPSS are used to process and analyze the data.The major findings of the study are: a) Considering from the perspective of word meaning, students are likely to use the meanings that bear specialized information related to their field, whereas the"general"meanings that function as cohesive devices in academic texts are underused. b) From the perspective of collocation, the number and word classes of the collocates that appear in the learner corpus are significantly less than that in the reference corpus. Students also tend to overuse some unconventional collocation. c) The rates of students'productive vocabulary that bear some textual functions is much lower than that of native writers.The above results show that, there is a great distinction between students and native writers'productive academic vocabulary. It is suggested that future vocabulary teaching should be more focused on the"general"meanings of academic vocabulary that play cohesive role in academic texts and the conventional academic collocations. The present study has great referential significance for academic vocabulary teaching and revision of the Course Outline of our school.