A Study On Breadth And Depth Of Productive Vocabulary In Sino-American Compositions Of Shared Topics

The problems that stand out about vocabulary breadth and depth are an imbalance between studies with the same focus on them, lack of a contrastive and comparative perspective and corpus-based research methodologies. There is, especially, deficient in researches which built on examination-oriented writings by Chinese and American learners to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between them aiming at enhancing the quality of Chinese learners in using vocabulary.In view of these problems, based on a self-made small corpus of Sino-American Compositions of Shared Topics, the thesis attempts to conduct a compartive and contrastive research on breadth and depth of productive vocabulary knowledge in writings by Chinese learners with high English level and their American counterparts. Findings show there are appreciable similarities and differences between compositions by Chinese and Amricans. To begin with, there are marked similarities in vocabulary size between the two groups of texts. The number of words they produce when writing tops over the number of 3000 words but stands at the number of 5000 words. of these words sharing tremondous similarity in coverage of different parts of speech, the majority are the most commonly used words belonging to GSL and most of them with more than 100 occurrences are functional and topic-related words. In the deep use of vocabulary knowledge, both Americans and Chinese employ a narrow range of senses of polysemes, few collocates of target words, and few high recurrent word combinations.Secondly, there also exist enormous differences in vocabulary breadth and depth between them. American learners output much larger vocabulary size which covers a wider range of words from GSL to AWL and embraces many more low frequency words with only one occurrence and content words as well. Chinese learners, however, overuse and underuse several words. In terms of vocabulary depth, Americans use many more senses of a polyseme and collocates of a target word but fewer high recurrent word combinations. By contrast, Chinese overuse, underuse or even don't use some senses and high recurrent word clusters are closely related to topics and classroom writing instruction.The research findings are of great significance to know and shorten the differences in vocabulary use and further raise the quality of writings by Chinese learners.