An Empirical Study On Productive Vocabulary Fossilization Of English Learning

Nation (1990) classified vocabulary into two categories: the receptive vocabulary andproductive vocabulary. This study constitutes an attempt to explore the condition ofproductive vocabulary fossilization in English major students. Based on the previoustheoretical and empirical studies, three research questions are presented: 1) how does theproductive vocabulary develop from perspective of quantity over the four-year university life?2) how dose the productive vocabulary develop from perspective of quality over the four-yearuniversity life? 3) what are the possible causes of this development in productive vocabulary?In order to probe into the three research questions, quantitative and qualitative methodsare used in this study. One hundred and twenty English major students in Jinzhong normaluniversity from four classes of grade one to grade four participated in this investigation. Atitle writing test was employed to test the development of productive vocabulary from aspectof quantity. As for the research of quality of productive vocabulary, a questionnaire includingeight Chinese-English translations was used and the eight sentences related to semanticfossilization in L2 vocabulary were designed based on two corpora: CLEC and ECBPC.There is another questionnaire in this study which was designed to show the condition ofproductive vocabulary fossilization and the possible causes of the phenomenon.After analyzing the data obtained from the subjects, several findings are found in thisstudy: 1) in respect of productive vocabulary size, grade three and grade four subjects usemore low-frequency word families compared with grade one and grade two. There is nosignificant different in productive vocabulary size between grade one and grade two, orbetween grade three and grade four. This result implies there are two plateaus duringfour-year university life, one is in grade two and the other is in grade four. 2) as for the qualityof productive vocabulary, the result indicates that there is an constantly increasing in semanticof vocabulary from grade one to grade three, however, in grade four, it seems that the stagnant or backsliding happens. 3) the possible causes of this phenomenon are: motivation shortage,insufficient output, low quality and quantity of input, and improper learning strategy.At last, this paper proposes several suggestions on the teaching and learning to avoidproductive vocabulary fossilization from aspects of motivation, output, input, vocabularylearning strategy, and feedback respectively.