The Development Of Chinese EFL Learners' Productive Vocabulary

This thesis reports a study on the development of Chinese EFL learners' productivevocabulary. To describe the Chinese EFL learners' productive vocabulary development, aconceptual framework was established, synthesizing the basic tenets of Nation's (1990) list ofword knowledge types, Levelt's (1989) speaking model with reference to how items arerepresent in the mental lexicon, and Anderson's (1982) Adaptive Control of Thought. Elevenvoluntary subjects' (4 males & 7 females) oral production was elicited during their first threesemesters of English learning at the University. The indices of productive vocabulary wereanalyzed from quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Data analyses reveal the followingmain findings: (1) the subjects enlarged their productive vocabulary in speech along with theirEnglish learning; (2) the subjects achieved a significant improvement in the use of past tenseafter three semesters of English learning and their performance in plurality, the copulastructure and articles fluctuated; (3) the subjects exhibited unstable usage of conceptualmeaning in speech as their proficiency improved. Their oral texts in this respect displayedvariability, overgeneralization and fossilization; (4) the subjects displayed variouspronunciation problems as they strove for more fluency as time elapsed. They had difficultyin producing certain high frequency words at the onset and more troubled by some lowfrequency words later on; (5) there was an imbalance between the subjects' desire for a highlevel of oral production and their underdeveloped procedural knowledge. They attempted tocoarticulate frequently and to vary their expressions, but automatic access to the internalrepresentation of mental lexicon was denied by their underdeveloped procedural knowledge,so they had to resort to the monitoring mechanism to cope with the linguistic deficiency,resulting in their frequent repairs; (7) the subjects' productive vocabulary depended partlyupon declarative and partly upon procedural knowledge. They were at the 'associative' stagein Anderson's (1982) terms.