Improvement Of Receptive And Productive Word Knowledge For Highly Familiar Polysemous Words: A Study On Chinese EFL Learners

This thesis reports a research on L2 vocabulary development in ChineseEFL classroom settings. Based on post-testS of the leamers'receptive/Productive semantic knowledge about highly familiar polysemouswords, it evaluates the effect of instructionaI treatments involving exposure andsemantic netWork building.One hundred and sixteen advanced Chinese EFL leamers were randomlydivided into three paralle1 groups (G1: 28, G2: 30, G3: 58) and took the pre-testof receptive/productive knowledge. In the next week, Group 1 gets no treatment(T0); Group 2 gets the Exposure-only treatment (T1) and Group 3 gets theExposure plus Semantic NetWork Building Treatment (T2). Still a week later, allgroups took the post-test of receptive/Productive knowledge.Through by-subject quantitative analysis, it is found that, in contrast withT0, T1 and T2 are effective in improving the learners' receptive and productivesemantic knowledge about highly frequent words. The byitem analysis on theunfamiliar meanings and collocations shows that 'I'2 is significantly better thanT1. A qualitative analysis suggests that ambiguity and opacity of words mayresult in difficulty in leaming unfamiliar meanings and collocations.The findings of the present study generally support current psycholinguisticmodels like Involvement Load Hypothesis. The pedagogical implications finallybring about the proposition of systCm-oriented vocabulary learning andteaching.