A Correlational Study Of Vocabulary Knowledge And EFL Writing Quality

Among such basic English skills as listening, speaking, reading and writing, writing has been the relatively less developed one for Chinese learners. Studies have shown that lack of vocabulary knowledge is regarded by learners as the most serious problem with writing. When engaged in English writing, many Chinese university students usually make more use of the vocabulary they learned in middle school, rather than the vocabulary they learned in their university study, which is detrimental to cultivation of their productive vocabulary ability and improvement of their writing quality. Comparisons between writings of EFL learners and those of native speakers reveal that EFL learners often use basic vocabulary while native speakers would use more precise infrequent words, which as a result improves their writing quality along with lexical richness. So it seems that vocabulary knowledge has some effect on writing quality and vocabulary use. This is what motivates the present study, from two dimensions— the receptive vs. productive knowledge and breadth vs. depth of knowledge, to assess EFL learners' vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary use through four assessment measures, and what's more, to explore the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and the overall writing quality as well as the vocabulary use in writing.The literature of vocabulary assessment is, to a great degree, confines to measurement of breadth of vocabulary knowledge, that is, the vocabulary size, receptive vocabulary size in particular. Much, however, remains unknown as to the state of learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, the present study, through assessment of learners' three aspects of vocabulary knowledge, namely, the receptive and productive knowledge and depth knowledge, makes an in-depth exploration about the correlation between vocabulary knowledge and writing quality as well as the vocabulary use. Thus the study gives a relatively comprehensive picture of EFL learners' vocabulary proficiency profile and clarifies the relationship between vocabulary proficiency and writing quality, providing constructive insights for English teaching program in EFL context.The thesis composes the following seven parts:The Introduction describes the significance, the purpose, the hypothesis as well as the research questions of the study. It also briefs the overall structure of the thesis.Chapter 1 surveys the relative issues concerning vocabulary acquisition, such as the taxonomy of vocabulary knowledge, the nature of vocabulary acquisition, etc.Chapter 2 provides a relatively comprehensive review of the assessment measures of vocabulary knowledge. Comments are also provided about the reliability, validity and practicability of these measures.Chapter 3 explores the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and writing quality and the vocabulary use as well, with reference to the related experimental researches in the literature.Chapter 4 records the details of the study and presents the results of the study. Of the three kinds of vocabulary knowledge, the productive vocabulary size has a rather significant correlation with the overall writing quality and the lexical richness, the depth of vocabulary knowledge a moderate yet significant correlation, while the receptive vocabulary size influences writing quality indirectly by affecting the lexical richness and lexical precision of the writing.Chapter 5 relates the results of the study to such language learning and teaching programs as vocabulary instruction, writing teaching, vocabulary testing and material development, with implications provided for each of these aspects respectively.Finally the Conclusion summarizes the main findings of the study and states the limitations of the study. It also proposes the direction of future research.