A Study On English Productive Vocabulary In High School Secondary-level Students’ Writing On The Same Topic In Urumqi

As we all know vocabulary is one of the most important factors in learning a foreign language. Productive vocabulary is the indicator of one ’s vocabulary size and the ability to use language. This research is aimed at investigating the level of students’ productive vocabulary on the same topic writing text. Students are from high school secondary level in Urumqi. In the study, it makes comparison between the high-score group and the low-score group in terms of vocabulary frequency profile, lexical density, lexical sophistication, length of the text, and the number of sentences, words in a sentence, word length, and word frequency in the text.Under the Nation’s vocabulary theory, this study is based on 128 writing texts on the same topic from high school students of the second grade. These writing texts are processed by Range 32 to get the data, such as vocabulary frequency profile, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. Wordsmith Tools 4.0 is for collecting: length of the text, and the number of sentences, words in a sentence, word length, and word frequency in the text. Then SPSS is used to analyze the differences and correlations between two groups.The results are as follows: firstly, from Range32 analysis we can know that subjects from both high-score group and low-score group generally overuse the first basic words(86.07%~87.83%); the percentage of low-score group in the first basic words is higher than high-score group. Low- frequency words and academic words are commonly underused in the text. The more low-frequency words and academic words the learner use, the higher score the learners get, so the percentage of low-frequency words and academic words are correlated to the quality of the writing. Secondly, there is significant difference between high-score group and lowscore group in terms of lexical density and lexical sophistication, and they are correlated to writing quality. Therefore, in teaching English more emphasis should be put on learning content words and low-frequency words. Finally, there is significant difference between high-score group and low-score group in length of the text, number of sentences, number of words in a sentence, word length, and these are correlated to writing quality. The subjects in low-score group tend to use repeatedly the words from writing prompt.Therefore, in teaching English, teacher should encourage learners to learn and use low-frequency words, academic words and content words in their writings. Thelength of the text and number of sentence are important factors. However, the overuse of high- frequency words is the cause of low-score.