| This thesis reports on a study designed to examine the development of Chinese EFL learners' productive vocabulary. Based on Nation's word knowledge framework with reference to how items are represented in the mental lexicon, it describes the acquisition pattern of productive vocabulary from the perspective of mental lexicon.After taking the test of the English Language Proficiency Assessment (Hever), thirty high school English learners, thirty university sophomores and thirty university seniors were divided into three groups representing 3 levels of English proficiency---the low level, the intermediate level, and the advanced level. For the purpose of eliciting responses involving links in lexical networks of Chinese-speaking learners of English, a controlled word association test was administrated.The data were analyzed from quantitative and qualitative perspectives. Data analyses revealed the following main findings: (1) Except for the acquisition of superodnates, the Chinese participants at each English proficiency level exhibited a poor mastery of the other three types of word knowledge investigated in the present study, namely, that of synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms. (2) Regarding productive mastery of word knowledge, the route followed by all the participants was superordinate →hyponym → antonym → synonym, whatever their proficiency level. (3) The acquisition of superordinate ended very early in the Chinese participants' development of English proficiency and there was a slow-down and even sliding-back afterwards. The acquisition of antonym witnessed a gradual increase in the scores for subjects at intermediate level, and then an ease in the increase between intermediate and advanced levels. In respect to the acquisition of hyponym and synonym, the rate of increase leveled off whenthe Chinese participants were progressing from the low level to the intermediate level. They showed a sharp increase in their knowledge only in the late stage of acquisition.
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