A Testing And Correlation Study Of Lexical Richness Of Productive Vocabulary Of College Freshmen

As the basic unit of meaning conveyance, vocabulary is an important part in Englishlearning. Great attention has been paid to the vocabulary application condition of Englishlearners. Lexical richness means the diversity and richness the vocabulary a writer or aspeaker employs in his or her productions. Therefore, it is a good reflection of the vocabularyemployment condition. Most of previous studies have investigated lexical richness in oral orwritten productions from one or two dimension(s). This paper would study lexical richness inoral and written productions of Chinese English learners from four dimensions.The language materials for this study are selected from the English placement tests ofHunan University. Each candidate has two pieces of language materials including oral andwritten one.200pairs of materials are selected and arranged according to their final scores,with the top50pairs into high proficiency group while the low50pairs being the samples inthe low proficiency group. All the candidates share the same topic in either speaking orwriting test respectively to avoid the influences of the topics on the results.Different linguists hold different views and concepts on lexical richness. Read’s (2000)taxonomy about lexical richness has been adopted for the present study, which includeslexical variation, lexical sophistication, lexical density and lexical error. Based on the lexicalrichness condition of English learners, the study makes research on differences andcorrelations between oral and written productions, the correlations between lexical richnessand productions quality, and correlations among the four dimensions of lexical richness.The present study has employed several measures which own good validity andreliability to process language materials. By using software such as vocd, Range, the materialshave been processed to calculate the data for each dimension. Then, SPSS has been applied toprocess all the data. Qualitative analysis has also been used to complement the quantitativeanalysis, with the results shown in the following:English learners in either high or low proficiency group employ vocabularies differentlyin oral and written productions. By T-test, it is found that there are significant differences inlexical richness between productions in high and low proficiency groups, in both speakingand writing. Significant differences also exist between speaking and writing except that thedifference in lexical error has not achieved significance in low proficiency group. It is alsofound that the lexical richness correlations between oral and written productions arenon-significant on the whole, with the correlations in low proficiency group higher than thosein high group. Almost all the dimensions have significant correlations with productionsquality in both high and low proficiency groups. With regard to the correlations among fourdimensions, the correlations among lexical richness in oral productions are low; and the interactions have no significant correlations with proficiency level. Besides, there are goodcorrelations among them in written productions. Each dimension of lexical richness has gooddistinction value.This study has made analysis on each phenomenon reflected by the data, and probed intothese phenomena and discussed the possible reasons leading to these phenomena. Eventually,based upon the data, the writer proposed some pointed suggestions, and exposed somedeficiencies and shortcomings of the study, paving a way for further related studies.