On The Vocabulary Development Of English Majors In Vocational College

Second language vocabulary acquisition is closely related to language teaching and language acquisition. In the field of second language vocabulary acquisition, Laufer makes it so salient that learners'vocabulary size should be investigated from receptive and productive perspectives. In the past, researchers who did research on second language acquisition mostly investigated the students'receptive vocabulary size and productive vocabulary size respectively, and only a few of them focused on the relationships between them at different learning stages. In addition, most of the studies made the four year undergraduate students as their subjects.Through a cross-sectional study, the present research investigates the learners'vocabulary size in a new way: simultaneously study the developmental features of receptive vocabulary size and productive vocabulary size of the English majors in a three-year vocational college and the relationships between them at different learning stages. 372 English majors from six intact classes from Year 1 to Year 3 in a vocational college in Hunan province took part in the investigation. The Vocabulary Levels Test proposed by Nation was adopted to measure the learners'receptive vocabulary size and the Active Vocabulary Test put forward by Laufer & Nation was used to measure the students'productive vocabulary size. Then the Lexical Frequency Profile analysis software RANGE, designed by Nation, was exploited to analyze the percentages of different word levels in the subjects'writing. 90 students (30 freshmen, 30 sophomores and 30 seniors) were selected on a stratified-random sampling basis.After analyzing all the data, we got the following conclusions: first, the receptive vocabulary size of the English majors from Year 1 to Year 3 increases significantly every academic year; second, the rising use of"basic 2000"category and"beyond 2000"category does not reach statistical significance in the development of English major's productive vocabulary size, which reveals that the learners'productive vocabulary size experiences a slow developmental pattern; third, the relationships between the learners'receptive vocabulary size and productive vocabulary size at different learning stages do not correlate with each other significantly, that is to say, the developmental features of the subjects'receptive vocabulary size is different from that of their productive vocabulary size. Then, the researcher discusses about the above conclusions from the perspectives of linguistics and psychology, trying to find out their theoretical, methodological and pedagogical implications on the second language vocabulary acquisition.In a word, this research is an exploration into the lexical development of the English majors in a three-year college and it is different from other relative studies at home and abroad in the method and the angle of the study. It is expected that the present study will reveal the distinctive developmental features of the receptive vocabulary size and productive vocabulary size of the English majors in the three-year college and the relationships between them at different learning stages. Thus, it can help the teachers find out the appropriate study methods in the teaching practice to make English teaching under classroom circumstance more systematic, purposeful and efficient.