A Correlated Study On Vocabulary Knowledge And Vocabulary Usage In English Writing

Vocabulary, as the information carrier, plays an indispensable role of language. Likely, vocabulary learning is a significant part in English learning, so vocabulary acquisition becomes one of the hottest SLA research fields. Although the status and importance of vocabulary acquisition have been acknowledged by linguists and language teaching researchers, they have attached more attention to breadth of vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary learning strategies and receptive lexical ability, seldom to depth of vocabulary knowledge and productive lexical ability. Theoretical and empirical studies concerning depth of vocabulary knowledge and productive lexical ability are also limited. The present study explores vocabulary knowledge from the perspectives of breadth and depth, and finds the correlation between vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary usage in EFL writing; thus, it enriches the research on depth of vocabulary knowledge and productive lexical ability.66 subjects, from one comprehensive university participating in this study, took the Vocabulary Levels Test, Productive Vocabulary Levels Test and Word Associates Test to measure their receptive and productive vocabulary breadth as well as depth of vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, they finished one composition for analyzing their vocabulary usage which included lexical sophistication and lexical variation. All the data and writing papers were analyzed with SPSS 16.0 and RANGE.The findings of the present study demonstrated that learning of receptive knowledge preceded productive knowledge and the high-frequency words were acquired earlier than the low-frequency words both receptively and productively; furthermore, the subjects mastered the meaning of the target word better than its collocation. It also indicated that receptive vocabulary knowledge, productive vocabulary knowledge and depth of vocabulary knowledge had a significant correlation between one another. For vocabulary usage, the research found that the subjects relied more on 1st 1000 word level to express their meanings in productive tasks and the lexical sophistication and lexical variation were not high. Subjects with different writing ability had differences in vocabulary usage, while the two groups only had significant differences in lexical variation but not in lexical sophistication. On the correlation between vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary usage, the research demonstrated that breadth of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge as well as depth of vocabulary knowledge had a negative correlation with the use of 1st 1000 word but a positive correlation with the words beyond 1st 1000 level, lexical variation and writing quality.Therefore, learners should not only pursue the enlargement of receptive vocabulary and ignore the development of productive vocabulary and depth of vocabulary knowledge, but try to balance receptive and productive lexical ability. The present study enriches the research on vocabulary acquisition in SLA and provides helpful implications for vocabulary teaching and learning to improve learners'productive lexical ability.