| In the field of second language acquisition for the past twenty years, vocabulary is a very common academic word, and vocabulary knowledge has already developed into an important part of second language proficiency. Summarizing all the previous literature on vocabulary teaching and research, most researchers focused on how learners acquire vocabulary by both direct and indirect methods, however, few studied the functions and positions of vocabulary knowledge in second language learning, not alone other aspects of vocabulary. Moreover, there exists discrepancy among their research results. As to vocabulary knowledge, many different definitions are proposed by different scholars, but one commonly accepted classification is that vocabulary knowledge contains two aspects: vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge.Vocabulary size(also called vocabulary breadth) means the size of a learners' vocabulary, reflecting the competence of grasping the most commonest meaning of a word. While depth of vocabulary knowledge means how deep a learner grasps the meaning and usage of a word, mainly including two aspects: meaning(synonyms and polysemes) and collocation, manifesting paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationship of vocabulary respectively.(Li, 2007) In this regard, this present study explores the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and second language proficiency.This study intend to answer the following three questions:(1) Does the participants' vocabulary size correlate with their second language proficiency and its specific skills? If yes, to what extent do they correlate?(2) Does the participants' depth of vocabulary knowledge correlate with their second language proficiency and its specific skills? If yes, to what extent do they correlate?(3) Do vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge predict scores on second language proficiency and its specific skills? If yes, to what extent can the two dimensions of vocabulary knowledge predict them?The participants in this present study are 127 non-English majors in a certain university. They have similar educational background. Research tools include three parts: the CET-4 held on June, 2015, vocabulary size test and vocabulary depth test.The latter two tests were held one week later after the CET-4 on June. After these two tests, the author collected and analyzed all the statistics by using SPSS 19.0.Then descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis wereadopted to investigate the research questions.The research results show that:(1) Vocabulary size is significantly correlated with scores on second language proficiency and each specific skill;(2) Depth of vocabulary knowledge also demonstrates a significant correlation with scores on second language proficiency and each specific skill;(3) Both vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge can predict the scores on total scores of second language proficiency, and vocabulary size has stronger predictive power than depth of vocabulary knowledge; vocabulary size can predict the scores on listening, reading comprehension, translation and writing, however, depth of vocabulary knowledge can only predict scores on reading comprehension, translation and writing.These above research results prove the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and its specific skills, which provide important statistics and results for research on second language lexical acquisition. Moreover, this present study has also put forward some practical suggestions. Such as, during the process of teaching and studying vocabulary for teachers and students respectively, they should not only lay emphasis on the accumulation of vocabulary size, but also pay attention to the improvement of the quality of vocabulary, namely grasp synonymy and collocation of vocabulary. Besides, teachers can provide test-preparation strategies and skills for students from the perspectives of vocabulary size and depth of vocabulary knowledge. |
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