Vocabulary Strength For English Majors In The Chinese Context

The vocabulary strength is a recent improvement upon the dimension of active and passive vocabulary knowledge. This paper explored the vocabulary knowledge of strength among English majors of four grades at a key comprehensive university in China. A bilingual version of English-Chinese test of strength was constructed and administered to randomly sampled subjects from each grade. The results proved the validity of hierarchy of vocabulary strength and distinguished four different modalities: active recall (hardest), passive recall, active recognition and passive recognition (easiest). Investigations into the development of strength modalities revealed that the two recognition modalities grew at similar paces and they developed faster than passive recall, which in turn increased faster than active recall. At college, the students' knowledge of four strength modalities from Grade 1 to 3 grew primarily at the 3000 word level and secondarily at the 5000 word level. There was virtually no increase from Grade 3 to 4 during the third year. Correlation analyses indicated that the two recall modalities had higher correlations with language proficiency. The findings of this paper reflect the significance of the recall modalities, and the difficulty and necessity of improving them.