A Study Of Productive Vocabulary Of Secondary School Learners In Shanghai

In the current situation in English teaching in Shanghai, the students show their weaknessess in speaking, and writing. This is attributed to the deficiency of the productive vocabulary. Based on previous literature, the author tried to measure the productive vocabulary of the senior school students in Pudong New District, Shanghai, beginning with Zipf’s Law until the software of AntWordProfiler. The analysis shows the deficiency of the productive vocabulary with the senior high school students in Pudong New District, Shanghai. The author proposes to adjust the two textbooks,"Basic Subject Teaching Requirements in English in Shanghai" and English teaching including editing the specific learning manual of the productive vocabulary, etc. after exploring the raison d’etre of the deficiency of the productive vocabulary.This essay is composed of six parts.Chapter One introduces the background, the current situation and the purpose of the research.Chapter Two is the review of the research, which mainly introduces the foothold of the research from the present situation of the research at home and abroad and the relative terms.Chapter Three illustrates the research method and the procedure. In the first phase of the measurement, this author employed Zipf s Law. Later, the author switched to a freeware frofiler developed by Laurence Anthony Corporation after having found the big gap between the preliminary research result and the actual situation Finally, the author used the mini-corpus to solve the problem of the measurement.Chapter Four presents the research result and the discussion. Through the measuring software, the author has found the productive vocabulary of the students in Pudong New District seriously deficient. This can go back to the two textbooks which the students in Shanghai rely on and the Teaching Requirements which the textbooks are based on in terms of the vocabulary requirement. Chapter Five focuses on implications. By comparing and analyzing, the author has found the reasons of the problems:the core vocabulary of the two textbooks are not adequate enough and selected without a good principle. The core vocabulary in the Teaching Requirements which the textbooks are based on is too large and has been selected inappropriately.The last part is the ending.