An Empirical Study On L2 Learners' Receptive And Productive Knowledge Of Vocabulary

For the basic conception of vocabulary, academic area has already reached a consistent agreement. However, for the essence and core issues of vocabulary development, there are still some divergences of L2 vocabulary acquisition research. Some scholars argue that vocabulary can be divided into receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary, which belong to separate system. Other scholars think reception and production of vocabulary are processed in one system, only happening in different stages in vocabulary acquisition. So there are no two types of vocabulary, but receptive knowledge and productive knowledge in vocabulary knowledge. Faced with such a divergence, based on Connectionism, this thesis chooses adjective collocation as an entry point, and discusses whether vocabulary can be divided into two categories as receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary.First, the research uses primary and secondary syntactic function as a standard, and chooses thirty-six Level-A adjectives from Chinese Lexical Syllabus to match. Then based on the adjectives chosen from CCL Corpus, the thesis does corpus collection and collocation marking.According to the frequency occurred in collocation, the paper chooses the collocation of high and low frequency of adjectives as experimental materials. Finally, the paper designs two sets of questionnaire, namely receptive knowledge test and productive knowledge test, to study the L2 learners' acquisition situation of receptive knowledge and productive knowledge of vocabulary. The conclusions of the thesis are as follows:(1) There are differences between receptive knowledge and productive knowledge. Overall, L2 learners' acquisition of receptive knowledge is better than productive one, with the gap between the two getting smaller as their Chinese level increasing.(2) The different influence the Syntactic function type on two kinds of knowledge is restricted by the Chinese level of the learners. In primary level, the difference between the two in main syntactic function is rather little, whereas pretty big in secondary syntactic function. In middle level, the difference in syntactic function is not apparent. In high level, the difference is big in main syntactic function, while little in secondary syntactic function.(3) Collocation frequency has effect on the distinction between receptive knowledge and productive knowledge, which is not influenced by the Chinese level of the learners. No matter what level it is, there are significant differences between the two knowledge in high frequency collocation, but not obvious in low frequency.(4) Receptive knowledge and productive knowledge belong to two dgrees in the process of L2 vocabulary acquisition. As the two kinds of knowledge enrich and develop, L2 mental lexicon of the learners is gradually built up, along with the improvement of their Chinese communication skills.Based on the above research results, we believe that reception and production of vocabulary are processed in one system, receptive and productive belonging to different phases of vocabulary acquisition. As a result, vocabulary can only be said as divided into receptive knowledge and productive knowledge, rather than receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. Accordingly, we should constantly enlarge receptive knowledge and productive knowledge of the learners' L2 so as to build up the complete L2 mental lexicon.