A Study Of Productive Vocabulary Breadth In The Writing Of A Group Of Non-English Majors

This research is oriented to explore the breadth of productive vocabulary in the writing of a group of non-English majors. First, it investigates productive vocabulary breadth in general. Then it makes comparison between the high-score group and the low-score group in terms of productive vocabulary breadth, lexical richness and lexical use. Finally it discusses the relationship between productive vocabulary breadth and writing quality.Timed compositions in a class of 136 second year students in Shandong University were collected for the study of productive vocabulary. First they were processed by running Range to get the data. Then all the data were analyzed by means of SPSS 10.0. The following major findings were obtained:Generally speaking, the free productive vocabulary breadth of the subjects on the whole is not large. Different subjects show remarkable variance in productive vocabulary breadth.Then the differences between high-score group and low-score group in productive vocabulary breadth and lexical use are analyzed respectively.The differences in the breadth of productive vocabulary between high-score group and low-score group are analyzed and compared in terms of lexical distribution, lexical variation (LV or TTR), and lexical sophistication (LS). Although students in both groups make very frequent use of basic 2000 words, learners in high-score group have much larger productive vocabulary breadth, because they use more infrequent words (17.42% > 9.67%) but less frequent words (82.59% < 90.33%) and produce longer compositions (188 > 152). Specifically, students with higher writing scores master the most frequent 1,000 words more skillfully and can use them more freely. As for the second most frequent 1,000 words, both groups share almost the same frequency. Learners in high-score group do produce many more low frequent words when forced to, especially academic words, because difference in academic words between these two groups is the most significant.Moreover, high-score group has better lexical richness than low-score group, as shown by higher LV and LS. Although there are differences between high-score group and low-score group, when compared with the total number they have learnt at college the advanced words these two groups of students put into use in their production under study are, in general, quite few.Through analyzing and comparing the differences in lexical use between high-score group and low-score group, it is found that the most commonly used words by the subjects are function words and content words related to the topic. Learners in high-score group can produce more advanced words that are learned in college while those in low-score group incline to choose simple words learned in middle school.In addition, the relationship between productive vocabulary breadth and writing quality is analyzed. The breadth of productive vocabulary does have an effect on writing quality, since overall writing quality has a high, significant correlation with the percentage of words beyond these three levels (.318) and an even higher correlation (.405) with the percentage of academic words. In other words, lexical sophistication influences the scores awarded to the writers greatly.In the end, this study gives a detailed account of the major findings and provides the rationale underlying them. It is hoped that this study can offer some help for the teaching, learning and testing of vocabulary in the Chinese EFL context.