A Study On The Development Of Breadth And Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge Among Chinese EFL Learners

Vocabulary is central to language and is of critical importance to EFL learners. So vocabulary acquisition has been investigated for decades. Most of the previous studies focus on vocabulary size, ignoring depth of vocabulary knowledge; emphasize the unitary dimension of vocabulary knowledge, ignoring the multi-dimension of vocabulary knowledge. The present study attempts to explore the development of second language vocabulary acquisition of non-English majors from freshmen to seniors in the hope of providing the developmental features of breadth of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge and depth of vocabulary knowledge and the correlation between them so as to call more attention to vocabulary instruction and learning and to ultimately promote the vocabulary acquisition ability of Chinese English learners.Altogether 120 subjects from grade one to grade four participating in this study were required to write a composition to measure their productive vocabulary size and vocabulary levels test and word associates test were employed to examine receptive vocabulary breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge. All the data and corpus were analyzed with Range, wordlist and SPSS 14.0.The findings of the present study demonstrated the development process and features of the three dimensions of vocabulary knowledge. Receptive vocabulary size increased linearly from freshmen to seniors. Productive vocabulary breadth was investigated from the perspectives of lexical distribution, lexical complexity and lexical diversity. Compared with receptive vocabulary, breadth of productive vocabulary developed lower, and it was closely related with proficiency levels of English. There was also plateau in the development of breadth of productive vocabulary knowledge from freshmen and sophomores to juniors and seniors. Depth of vocabulary knowledge improved greatly from freshmen to juniors, while from juniors to seniors, no significant improvement could be found, which indicated there was fossilization during the development of depth of vocabulary knowledge. Breadth of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge and depth of vocabulary knowledge were correlated in different degrees from freshmen to seniors.In addition, the findings of the study also gave pedagogical implications for both teachers and students, which could enlighten learners to acquire L2 vocabulary effectively.The present study enriches the research on vocabulary acquisition in SLA and provides helpful implications from the aspect of pedagogy in order to have a further exploration into how to improve English learners'vocabulary size and develop their lexical competence.