A Longitudinal Study Of The Productive Vocabulary Breadth Knowledge In Non-english Major's Writing

Productive vocabulary research has always been one of the most important areas in second language acquisition.Although previous studies have achieved a great number of results,many of them are contradictory.The knowledge of productive vocabulary breadth,especially its development within an amount of time,still demands further study.Some studies suggested that the development pattern follows a linear and predictable way,while others indicated that the process is a non-linear but fluctuant one.Based on that,this study took a group of non-English majors as subjects and conducted a study to find out the development pattern of the vocabulary breadth knowledge in their sophomore year.The corpus in the study includes 1056 compositions that are finished by 132 students abiding strictly by the rubrics of CET4.The study suggested that in productive vocabulary breadth knowledge,the breadth knowledge indicated to be within 3000 word lemmas at the beginning of the third semester and in the end of the forth semester,the figure appeared to be 4000.The study results demonstrated that the development pattern of the subjects' productive vocabulary breadth knowledge within the year was a less linear one but a fluctuant one.In productive vocabulary depth,the study focused on lexical richness,and its development path also appeared to be a fluctuant one.It was suggested that the lexical richness had an obvious but steady increase in number.In addition,the performance in productive vocabulary knowledge of non-English majors still had an obvious gap,compared with that of English majors.The study is a longitudinal one that makes an attempt to find out the development pattern of vocabulary breadth knowledge as wellas lexical richness of non-English majors based on corpus.