The Analysis Of Vocabulary Knowledge From The Aspects Of Vocabulary Breadth And Vocabulary Depth

Vocabulary,as the basic and elementary component of a language,runs through the whole process of language learning and its significance has been widely recognized and accepted by vocabulary teachers and language researchers since 1980 s.Since then,they began to have intensive researching towards the various aspects of vocabulary knowledge in order to improve the language learners’ vocabulary ability.However,up till now,language researchers and teachers still haven’t reached an agreement and could not draw a reliable conclusion to the vocabulary knowledge.At the same time,the most attention of researchers has been put onto the receptive vocabulary size and the researches towards the productive vocabulary and the vocabulary depth have been neglected and ignored by them for a long time.Besides,different tools for the measurement of different aspects of vocabulary knowledge also prevent us from getting a conclusive result towards the vocabulary knowledge.Under such circumstance,in my research,I try to have a detailed exploration to the vocabulary knowledge from the three aspects of vocabulary knowledge: receptive vocabulary knowledge,productive vocabulary knowledge and depth of vocabulary knowledge.Therefore,the thesis developed itself with three questions: the overall description of vocabulary knowledge from three aspects of vocabulary knowledge,the interrelationships among them and the exploration of relationship from each frequency level.In my research,85 English majors were involved as the participants from university.The tools adopted in the research were the Vocabulary Level Test from the receptive aspect and productive aspect which were both designed by PaulNation.For the measurement of depth of vocabulary knowledge,Word Associates Format designed by Read was adopted.And the collected statistics were analyzed by the SPSS.Through the comprehensive discussion and the analysis to three questions,I’d like to have a relatively clear understanding and cognition to the vocabulary knowledge,make up the gap that have existed in the researching filed of Second Language Acquisition of vocabulary and get a comprehensive cognition and rounded picture towards the vocabulary knowledge.Besides,some corresponding suggestions and measures had been come up with from pedagogical aspect according to the research findings in order to improve second language learners’ vocabulary ability.It is found after the experiment that the mean of score of each frequency level is declined gradually from the high frequency level list to the low frequency level list in the aspects of receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledge in general.Make a comparison between the scores of RVK and PVK,the score of RVK is much higher than the scores of PVK at each frequency level.Besides,receptive vocabulary knowledge is highly related with the productive vocabulary knowledge,which means that the growth in receptive vocabulary knowledge automatically results in increase in productive vocabulary knowledge.