A Tracing Study On Oral Lexical Competence Development Of Italian Elementary Chinese Learners

Vocabulary acquisition is of crucial importance to second language acquisition, by describing and analyzing the vocabulary production of Chinese learners,we can have an insight into their learning effect and learning pattern, according to which we can give better advice to Chinese teaching and help the learners improve their language competence. The current researches on vocabulary acquisition focus mainly on written language output, but not much on oral language output, and synchronic studies are more than tracing studies. This paper chooses1.3elementary Italian Chinese learners, collects their oral language output at regular intervals in3months.we collect45person-time oral output materials, then transfer the voice material into text, amount to125.5minutes,6065words. Then we quantify the text in6different levels.Along with retrospective interviews to the students, we describe the lexical competence of the subjects in four aspects:lexical fluency, lexical variation, lexical sophistication and lexical accuracy. In addition, we applied micro genetic method to a further study on a typical subject, so that we can have a deeper insight into the periodical characteristics and details of lexical competence development.The study reveals that during3months in target-language environment, lexical fluency, lexical sophistication and lexical accuracy have had significant improvement, while the lexical variation has not developed significantly. At elementary level of Chinese learning, the difficulty on lexical access is the main reason of oral language disfluency; lexical fluency develops along with the improvement of lexical knowledge and expression strategy. The development of lexical variation is very unstable:Learning method, expression strategy and the using of target language environment are responsible to the change of lexical variation. Lexical sophistication has a stable and significant growth, and the advanced vocabulary fossilize shortly when the learners reach a certain level. The error rates of output vocabulary decreases very fast at first and then increase slightly in later period, the acquisition of different dimensions of lexical knowledge has shown a complex condition of multi-level and imbalance, which indicates that the insufficient of word knowledge and the vocabulary system of the subjects is influenced by their first language.However, we have also discovered several progress patterns of specific words using. Different level groups show significant difference only on lexical sophistication. And the development of their lexical competence is not linear, but quiet complicated with different phases and patterns.Base on the results above, we put forward the following suggestions to Chinese vocabulary teaching:first, we should attach importance to the influence of first language, understand the basic knowledge of the learners’first language,contrast the learners’first language and second language, so that we can apply a better teaching method to avoid the negative transfer of their first language; second, we should help the students integrate lexical form, meaning and usage,build a semantic network of second language words: third, we should value the language environment. In classroom teaching, we should try to build a learning environment that are as close to the real language environment as possible to teach and practice words, meanwhile encourage the learners to use the language resources of target language environment outside the class; at last, we should pertinently adjust teaching method according to the pattern and different phases of the lexical competence of Chinese learners.