Study Of Chinese Non-English Majors' Development Of Passive And Active Vocabulary In Written Form In The Classroom Setting

Wilkinson (1972) once said:"without grammar, very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed". It means that vocabulary is the building material of language, and vocabulary study is the most important in any language learning. Therefore, vocabulary becomes one of the focuses on language teaching and research. Over the last thirty years, the topic of vocabulary knowledge has been a major issue for both first and second language educators and researchers, reflected in the voluminous literature covering both theoretical research and practical instruction. A number of researches have been conducted in vocabulary assessing, vocabulary teaching methodology, vocabulary learning strategies etc. These researches have yielded great benefits in making vocabulary teaching and learning more efficient. At the same time, investigating the progress of learners'vocabulary size can also be of considerable value to language research and pedagogy. However, in China, there are very few quantitative studies where vocabulary size, especially both the passive and active vocabulary size, is measured at different stages of language learning over a long period of time.In the present study, the subjects are 82 students from School of Humanities. They were enrolled into Xinjiang Normal University in 2005. Three vocabulary tests are used to conduct a longitudinal study of these students'development of passive and active vocabulary in written form over one year's college instruction.It is found that for Chinese non-English majors, both passive vocabulary and controlled active vocabulary progress, but free active vocabulary does not progress apparently. The result also indicates that the scores of passive and controlled active vocabulary correlate with each other and that free active vocabulary, on the other hand, does not correlate with the other two types. It is also shown that the gap between passive and controlled active vocabulary is bigger after one year's study except that on the 2000 word-frequency level. The gap between passive and controlled active vocabulary also becomes bigger in the same individual with the word-frequency is reduced. The main pedagogical implications of college English instruction and learning can be drawn from this study are: (1) focusing on the comprehension, enough quantity and correction of vocabulary input; (2) leading the Length Approach into the English teaching for non-English majors and paying attention to the correction of composition.The study is mainly composed of six parts. The first is an introduction. The second part focuses on the literatures related to the study, including the nature of vocabulary knowledge, active vocabulary and passive vocabulary, vocabulary tests in written form and previous studies on the development of vocabulary knowledge. The third part can be further divided into four sub-parts: research questions (research hypotheses), subjects, research methods, procedures and test scoring. The fourth part provides the results and discussion about this longitudinal study. The fifth part is the main pedagogical implications of college English teaching and learning. The conclusion of the research is presented in the last part, in which suggestions for vocabulary teaching and learning and limitations of the research are also discussed.