The Influence Of Productive Vocabulary Breadth On English Writing Of Undergraduate Non-english Majors

As the basic unit of English writing, vocabulary is an important carrier ofinformation. A large vocabulary guarantees the improvement of English writing.However, studies that are related to the correlation between productive vocabularyand the quality of English writing both at home and abroad are not common. In viewof this, the author conducted an analysis on the output of vocabulary in Englishwriting, and also studied how the breadth of vocabulary affects the students’ Englishwriting based on the two indicators of productive vocabulary breadth to get someimplications for the use of vocabulary in writing.Based on the frequency and probability of words in English, the author employsthe tool of Range to study the word frequency in students’ English writing.Meanwhile, the author proposed three questions as follows: First, how about theoutput of the vocabulary in the students’ English writing? Second, what’s thedifference of productive vocabulary among students’ English writings in terms oflexical variation and sophistication? Third, how do the lexical variation andsophistication affect the students’ English writing?All the writing samples with the same topic and time setting are collected from92undergraduates enrolled in2011in Shandong Polytechnic University. Later, all thesamples will be graded by four experienced teachers with high credibility. Then, allwriting samples can be divided into high, medium and low score groups, and then allthe data will be processed by the tool of Range. Finally, SPSS13.0will be used toanalyze these data. The results proved that the overall productive vocabulary breadthin students’ English writing is not satisfying. Furthermore, in terms of the lexicalvariation and lexical sophistication, high score group is superior to the medium group,and the low score group is the worst. The results also proved that the breadth ofproductive vocabulary would affect the quality of students’ English writing. To somedegree, lexical variation and lexical sophistication are relevant to the scoring of thewriting, especially the relevance of English writing to the lexical sophistication is more obvious.Finally, the author summarized this study and analyzed the reasons why differentgroups behaved differently in word choice in English writing, and explained someexisting problems and limitations in this study. In addition, the author also gave someother constructive suggestion to the vocabulary learning.