The Development Of Productive Vocabulary Of English Majors From The Perspective Of Dynamic Systems Theory

Since1970s, vocabulary acquisition, as an important research focus of secondlanguage acquisition, has drawn attention of more and more researchers both at homeand abroad. Meanwhile, as receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary havebeen distinguished, contributions have been made within measurement of productivevocabulary and relationship between receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary.However, in China, less emphasis has been put on the development of productivevocabulary. Firstly introduced into second language acquisition by Larsen Freeman(1997), Dynamic Systems Theory focuses on the point that language development isnot simply a linear process guided by input but a complex and dynamic process.Furthermore, some scholars at home and abroad also conduct researches to confirmthe nonlinear path of the vocabulary development.According to Dynamic Systems Theory and the dynamic characteristics of thevocabulary acquisition process, metaphor awareness raising and vocabulary learningstrategies are adopted to the study of learners’ productive vocabulary development.The current study seeks to find answers to the following questions:1. If metaphor awareness raising and vocabulary learning strategies training arecorrelated with productive vocabulary, what are the traits of productive vocabularydevelopment?2. What is the correlation between metaphor awareness raising and productivevocabulary development?3. What is the correlation between vocabulary learning strategies training andproductive vocabulary development?The empirical study was undertaken in a university of Shandong province, wherethe subjects are60English majors of grade two and they are divided into anexperimental class (30) and a controlled class (30). Aiming at improving thedevelopment of productive vocabulary, metaphor awareness raising and vocabularylearning strategies training have been conducted in Integrated English teaching for theexperimental class while no pedagogical-interventive techniques have been done in the controlled class. Each student of both classes has been asked to write acomposition of the same type twice per semester. After ten months, the first and thefourth timed compositions of60individuals were typed into the computer andanalyzed by Range and SPSS for measuring their productive vocabulary size. Then acorrelation analysis was carried out in the data to find out whether, guided byDynamic Systems Theory, metaphor awareness raising and vocabulary learningstrategies are correlated with the development productive vocabulary.Major findings of the current study are:1. Some English majors’ productive size is not large, yet to some extent,metaphor awareness raising and vocabulary strategies training have effect on thedevelopment productive vocabulary.2. The teaching of metaphors has improved the vocabulary retention andextending, thus metaphor awareness raising helps to improve students’ productivevocabulary size.3. Cognitive, Metacognitive, Social and Memory Strategies are significantlycorrelated with English majors’ productive vocabulary size.On a whole, from the perspective of Dynamic Systems Theory, metaphorawareness raising and vocabulary strategies training are correlated with productivevocabulary, however owing to the limitations of the study, further explorations in thisaspect are necessary.