Influence Of Lexical Competence On Students’ Integrated Abilities Of English

It is known that vocabulary learning plays an important role in language learning. The main study of lexical competence is focused on the width and depth of vocabulary, the lexical competence’s influence on one aspect of English or the integrated abilities of English, and the acquisition of vocabulary.Based on the case study of 74 English-major postgraduates recruited in 2013 at Guangxi University, one of the 211 key universities in China, this thesis tries to analyze the lexical competence of English-major postgraduates through their performance in Vocabulary Level Test, Productive Level Test, Test for Translation Ability and Linguistic Ability, and TEM-8 (Test for English Majors Band 8). The thesis discovers the correlation between participants’ lexical competence (receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, translation ability, linguistic ability, vocabulary size) and the integrated abilities of English on a theoretical level. At the same time, combining qualitative and quantitative study together, this thesis adds questionnaire and interview on the basis of vocabulary test, and tries to find out the relation between lexical competence and the integrated abilities of English from the aspect of attitude, strategy and experience in students’ learning on a practical level in order to improve the deficiencies of the test. To overcome the shortcomings of the traditional empirical evaluation of students’ lexical competence, the thesis also applies Analytic Hierarchy Process to the study of students’lexical competence, and forms the Integrated Assessment Models. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) 19.0 is used in analyzing the tests and questionnaires through descriptive statistics, Pearson Correlation and Multiple Linear Regression. Excel is used to judge the consistency in Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).The major findings of the thesis are as follows:Firstly, the participants’ grades decrease in receptive vocabulary test and productive vocabulary test along with the reduction of word frequency. The students’ performance has a close relationship with the word frequency. And in general, participants perform better in the receptive vocabulary size test than in the productive vocabulary size test, meaning that their mastery of receptive vocabulary is better than productive vocabulary. Secondly, translation ability has less influence on the integrated abilities of English, which means that mastering the basic meaning of vocabulary is far from being enough for improving one’s integrated abilities of English. Thirdly, compared with translation ability, linguistic ability has a greater influence on the integrated abilities of English. The reason might be because it is measured from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Fourthly, attitude plays the largest role in vocabulary learning in practical learning, while experience the smallest. And all the strategies would help vocabulary learning.Based on the statistics and analysis, conclusions are drawn as follows:Firstly, different aspects of lexical competence have different levels of influence on the integrated abilities of English. Secondly, productive vocabulary, especially the low frequency at the Levels 5,000 and 10,000 word frequency has the highest correlation with the integrated abilities of English, which shows that the study and the mastery of low frequency productive vocabulary should be given more attention to. Thirdly, attitude plays an essential role in vocabulary learning, which indicates that learners should attach more importance to vocabulary learning. Lastly, lexical competence can only explain a small part of the integrated abilities of English to some extent, leaving more influencing factors to be taken into consideration, such as the reserve of encyclopedic knowledge, the mastery of related language testing, and the psychological factors in exams.From what has been discussed above, this thesis suggests that English major postgraduates’ curriculum should raise the awareness of vocabulary learning and focus more on the cultivation of students’ ability of middle and low frequency band vocabulary, productive vocabulary, collocation, language testing and encyclopedic knowledge. Due to factors like time limit and number of participants, the limitation of this thesis is proposed as a case study which should not be of a universal application. Suggestions for future studies are also presented at the end of the thesis.