A Study Of Relationship Between L2 Lexical Acquisition Patterns And L2 Lexical Competence Of Non-English Major University Students

Vocabulary acquisition is considered as an important field of L2 instruction research, and it is also one of focuses of L2 learning. In the past decades, the focus of L2 word researches is mainly on the breadth and depth of L2 learners' word knowledge, but little attention was paid to L2 learners' ability to use word knowledge, e. g., word competence. How to improve L2 learners' word competence is a common issue faced by L2 instructors and learners. L2 word acquisition pattern is a relatively fixed learning behavior and also major means L2 learner adopted in their L2 acquisition. The present study tries to explore the relationship between L2 word acquisition pattern and L2 word competence through experimental methods.The present study is based on Richard and Nation's classification on word competence which is intended for the theoretical framework and O'Malley et al. word acquisition pattern is treated as the investigation basis of L2 learners' word acquisition practice. The operational definition of the L2 word competence is: 1. the breadth of L2 word knowledge; 2. the depth of L2 word knowledge; 3. the L2 lexical receptive competence (word competence based on conscious recollection); and 4. the L2 lexical productive competence (word competence automated). The study addresses the L2 word competence (receptive and productive) from four angles: knowledge of word meaning; knowledge of synonyms; knowledge of derivatives and knowledge of collocation. L2 word acquisition pattern involves four macro-patterns, and they are: meta-cognitive pattern, cognitive pattern, socio-affective pattern and application pattern of L2 learning dictionary, each macro-pattern covers several micro-patterns. The rationale of present study is from: 1. word knowledge theories of Richard and Nation; 2. theory of depths of processing proposed by Craik & Lockhart, theory of activation and spreading model proposed by Collins & Loftus and the theory of L2 word representation and development from Jiang Nan. The present study tries to answer these issues through the investigation of relationship between L2 word acquisition patterns and L2 word competence by experiment methods:1. Whether the relationship exist between different L2 word acquisition patterns and the breadth and depth of L2 word knowledge.2. Whether the relationship exist between different L2 word acquisition patterns and L2 word competence (receptive and productive).3. What the differences of L2 word acquisition patterns between group scoring high and group scoring low in the depth of L2 lexical knowledge and in the L2 lexical productive competence are.The present study first survey subjects' L2 word acquisition patterns through questionnaire for insights into subjects' word acquisition pattern, then cross-sectional study was taken to test subjects' word knowledge (breadth and depth) and word competence (receptive and productive). For exploring the relationship between word acquisition pattern and word competence, the present study takes the figures of word acquisition pattern survey as independent variable and the figures of tests of word knowledge and word competence were taken as dependent variables. The whole statistic of figures was conducted with the analysis of Spearman correlation for gaining correlation coefficients between different word acquisition patterns and word knowledge (breadth and depth) and, word competence (receptive and productive). The significance test and T-test were taken in order to test the difference of the word acquisition pattern between group scoring high and group scoring low in depth of L2 word knowledge and in L2 lexical productive competence.The statistical results show:1. Resourcing acquisition pattern, contextualization acquisition pattern, selective attention acquisition pattern, E-dictionary acquisition pattern and E-C dictionary acquisition pattern are related with the breadth and depth of word knowledge. But E-dictionary acquisition pattern's correlation coefficient with depth of word knowledge is negative significant statistically.2. The differences of word acquisition pattern between high group and low group in depth of wordknowledge mainly exist in four patterns: contextualization acquisition pattern, resourcing acquisition pattern, selective attention acquisition pattern and pattern of learning dictionary application.3. The differences of word productive competence between high group and low group in word productive competence mainly exist in resourcing acquisition pattern, selective attention acquisition pattern and pattern of learning dictionary application4. The development of word knowledge and word competence is unbalanced: the mastery of L2 wordknowledge is better than that of L2 word competence; the mastery of breadth of word knowledge is superior to that of depth of word knowledge; the word receptive competence is vastly superior to that of productive word competence; the word semantic and collocation competence are obvious stringer than those of synonyms and derivatives.The present study discusses the results of the statistic from three angles: Essentially, a L2 word acquisition pattern is a kind of processing of word knowledge. Then, different L2 word acquisition patterns are different processing processes of word knowledge in different depths. The depths of L2 learner's processing to various words' knowledge are different out of different L2 word acquisition patterns. As a result of this, some word knowledge are integrated into the established semantic network in mental lexicon for deep processing and can be retrieved automatically, while other word's knowledge is not integrated into learner's existed semantic network in mental lexicon for shallow processing and their retrieval depend on conscious recollection.The reason why lexical productive competence is low was analyzed as the following: The lack of contextualized input and the interferences of already established L1 semantic system when learning L2 word blocks the construction of L2 semantic network in mental lexicon. So the lexical production need more outside aides for lack of contextualized input and the constrain of L1 semantic network in mental lexicon, consequently the retrieval of word knowledge become quiet difficult and the lexical production is inappropriate when the outside aides is unavailable in production.