A Survey On Vocabulary Proficiency Of Junior High School Students

Vocabulary is the building material of language, and vocabulary study is therefore the most important in any language learning. One of the fundamental goals for English learners is to expand their vocabulary knowledge. Studies on learners' vocabulary have already shifted from quantitative investigations to qualitative ones in foreign countries while in China, this kind of research mainly measures learners' passive vocabulary size, with the assessment of acquisition order of vocabulary being often neglected.This paper adopts Paribakht & Wesche's Vocabulary knowledge Scale and measurement theory in trying to make a small scale investigation on junior high school students' vocabulary in Ninghai Middle School with such research instruments as vocabulary test. This research is oriented to explore the acquisition of the vocabulary knowledge of Chinese EFL learners at three different proficiency levels. 391 junior high school students are tested on their receptive mastery of meaning. It has also reviewed several features inherent in the word itself which might affect the ease or difficulty with which it is learned. These factors can benefit for analyzing the acquisition order of the word.The raw data are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The following major findings are obtained: 1) The vocabulary size of each grade is 810, 1129, 1452 respectively. One problem was found out in the vocabulary size testing, which is insufficient vocabulary of all the proficiency levels.2) On the whole, there is a developmental pattern of word knowledge acquisition through different proficiency levels. The breath of vocabulary develops more saliently than the breath of vocabulary, which is the case for all three proficiency levels. So at the highest proficiency level, the depth of word lags far behind the breath of word. 3) This study shows that the length of word itself and reoccurrence play a more important role in vocabulary learning. 4) Generally speaking, vocabulary size is significantly correlated with L2 proficiency.