| Words are the basic building blocks of language, the units of meaning from which larger structures such as sentences, paragraphs and whole texts are formed. Many learners identify second language acquisition as essentially a matter of learning vocabulary, so they spend a great deal of time on vocabulary. Many studies have shown that vocabulary correlates strongly with learners' reading, writing and general competence in English. Therefore, a number of researches have been conducted in vocabulary assessing, vocabulary teaching methodologies, vocabulary learning strategies etc. Their research has yielded great benefits in making vocabulary teaching and learning more efficient.An understanding of the learners' passive and vocabulary is essential to cultivating their competence, and the relationship between passive and active vocabularies remains intriguing but unexplored. Then, in this study the passive and active vocabularies of English and non-English major freshmen and sophomores are estimated and compared in order to reveal how their passive and active vocabularies develop. The subjects are 114 non-English majors and 86 English majors from a key university in China. The non-English majors include 72 freshmen and 42 sophomores, while the English majors are respectively 43 freshmen and 43 sophomores. The non-English majors are learning English by using the same textbooks, teachingmethodologies, the same number of hours for English lessons and with the same main extrinsic motivation of passing the CET-4 and/or CET-6. Every week they have 4-hour intensive reading and 1-hour listening. Therefore, intensive reading course is the most important source of their vocabulary. In the classroom, in addition to reading the texts, many other direct vocabulary teaching activities are conducted, including explanation of the new words and their usage, doing vocabulary exercises, dictation, sentence-making or translation, and writing. The English majors studying English under similar conditions and the same curriculum, on the other hand, have about 10 hours English lessons each week, including intensive reading, extensive reading, listening, and speaking. Since communicative approach is adopted in the English lessons, direct vocabulary teaching is rarely used for teaching and learning vocabulary. Therefore, it is assumed that the English majors' vocabulary learning represents implicit vocabulary learning with multi-channel input, while non-English majors" signifies explicit vocabulary leaning with intensive reading as the most important input. The Vocabulary Levels Tests and Lexical Frequency Profile are used as the instruments for estimating and analyzing their passive, controlled active and free active vocabularies. Then, the data are processed by SPSS to calculate their vocabularies, the differences between the vocabularies of freshmen and sophomores and the correlations.It is shown that passive vocabulary is always larger than active vocabulary andtheir vocabulary development "stops" at high frequency levels under the present learning conditions in China. The result also indicates that explicit vocabulary teaching can enhance the development of active vocabulary. It is also found that, unlike non-English majors, the increase in passive and controlled active vocabularies of English majors is not reflected in an increase in their free active vocabulary. This has important implications for teaching English in China. Judged by international standards and the criteria set in College English Curriculum Requirements (For Trial Implementation)(2004), the vocabulary of college students in China is unsatisfactorily lower and vocabulary teaching should be further enhanced. Based on the results, a series of pedagogical implications are presented. Finally, suggestions on further research are given, with a view to improving vocabulary teaching and learning in China.
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