Investigation Into English Major Freshmen's Vocabulary Knowledge In Dialogues

This study was intended to investigate English major freshmen's vocabulary knowledge in dialogue. 268 English major freshmen from Nantong University participated in the oral test, and 268 transcripts of oral English test were employed to answer three research questions:1. What are the general characteristics of vocabulary knowledge reflected from English major freshmen's dialogues?2. What are the differences of vocabulary knowledge between high achievers and low achievers?3. Is there any relationship between English major freshmen's vocabulary knowledge and their oral proficiency?The purposes of this study are to find out the role vocabulary knowledge plays in oral English and to improve students' oral proficiency. The significance of the study lies in three aspects. Theoretically, the study expanded the theory of vocabulary knowledge, provided a new perspective of analyzing vocabulary knowledge in speaking context and confirmed some of previous findings that Chinese English learners repeated certain words in their dialogues. Practically, the current study was intended to provide a general description of English major freshmen's vocabulary knowledge in speaking and make their oral production more native-like. Methodologically, most of previous studies were concerned with vocabulary knowledge in writing or written forms. Such an attempt was one of the first to analyze vocabulary knowledge in dialogue. The computer program RANGE was employed in this study, and the results obtained from RANGE were analyzed from three aspects of lexical richness (lexical variation, lexical sophistication, word frequency) as major indicators of students' vocabulary knowledge reflected from their dialogues. The major findings were summarized as follows:1. Students in this study tended to use certain uncommon spoken words of native speakers and displayed written style of word uses in their dialogues, and they repeated certain words, which reflected students in this study had a small vocabulary at their disposal.2. Differences in vocabulary knowledge between high achievers and low achievers in terms of size and depth reflected from their dialogues showed that high achievers had a better mastery of vocabulary knowledge than low achievers did.3. On the whole, there was a positive relationship between vocabulary knowledge and English major freshmen's oral proficiency, but it did not mean that every case had this kind of relationship, that is, the same number of words might yield different scores, for many other factors like pronunciation, intonation and fluency also affected their oral proficiency.The present study was limited in three ways.First, this study did not examine any other specific aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge, like collocation and meaning.Second, this study was based upon students' dialogues in oral tests. In this form of oral production, students' performances to some extent were influenced by some other factors, for example, the given topics, the partner in the dialogue etc.Third, not all aspects concerning speaking could be included due to the scope of the study. Many more aspects concerning learners' oral proficiency, such as fluency and lexical accuracy should have been included in analyzing learners' vocabulary knowledge in speaking.The findings of the study can assist the language instructors in exploring a method conducive to improving oral proficiency and in designing teaching tasks that can heighten and facilitate the learners' proper use of vocabulary knowledge in speaking to be more native-like.