| Vocabulary as the basic component of language plays a critical role in second language acquisition and has therefore drawn great attention from quite a few researchers and teachers. A common practice to study vocabulary is to explore it from two aspects, i.e., the active and passive aspects. Setting from the widely-accepted belief that learners normally have a larger passive vocabulary than an active one, the present study investigated the active and passive vocabulary knowledge of third-year English majors, hoping to get more information about the gap between these two types of vocabulary knowledge and to detect possible ways to narrow it.The participants in the study included 57 third-year English majors. An active vocabulary test adapted from Laufer & Nation's (1999) Controlled-Productive Vocabulary Levels Test, a passive vocabulary test adapted from Nation's (1990) Vocabulary Levels Test and a vocabulary learning strategies questionnaire adapted from Gu & Hu's (2003) Vocabulary Learning Questionnaire (VLQ Version 5) were employed as research instruments. Descriptive statistical analysis and correlation analysis were conducted to analyze the data collected. Results showed that third-year English majors have a passive vocabulary of no less than 5 000 words and an active vocabulary of no more than 3 000 words. For those who claim a larger passive vocabulary, they also have a relatively large active vocabulary. The ratio of their active to passive vocabulary knowledge is about 2/3. In further analysis, two types of metacognitive strategies (selective attention and self-initiation) and three types of cognitive strategies (immediate context, association/elaboration and activation strategies) - altogether five vocabulary learning strategies were found to be positively and significantly correlated with active vocabulary knowledge. However, compared with other strategies, it seemed that they were not used to an adequate degree. |
