A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Depth Knowledge Based On Extended Unit Of Meaning

Vocabulary knowledge is generally divided into vocabulary breadth knowledge and vocabulary depth knowledge.Since 1990s,studies on language acquisition have shifted their attention from studying vocabulary breadth to vocabulary depth.Though many tests have been proposed both at home and abroad,the research methods are inconsistent,the research dimensions are incomplete and the number of participants is limited.Most fundamentally,the definition of vocabulary depth knowledge is still unclear.Therefore,this thesis gives its operational definition of vocabulary depth knowledge,takes EUM(extended unit of meaning)as the theoretical foundation,TECCL corpus as the research corpus and six BROWN family corpora as the reference corpus,and sets"high frequency,rich meaning,diverse collocation" as the criteria of word selection.By analyzing collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody of the three selected words,"young","attention" and "try",and making a comparison of these words in the research corpus with those in the reference corpus,this thesis intends to testify the feasibility of applying EUM to describe vocabulary depth knowledge,explore Chinese EFL learners’ mastery of vocabulary depth knowledge,and find their problems in the use of vocabularies.The following findings are concluded:(1)EUM can well reflect language users’mastery of words on the lexical,grammatical,semantic and pragmatic layer.(2)on the lexical and grammatical layer,Chinese EFL learners not only have lower collocation and colligation richness,but also tend to either misuse or over-use certain lexical or grammatical structures.(3)on the semantic and pragmatic layer,Chinese EFL learners tend to endow words their own understanding of meanings and ignore some semantic and pragmatic use of certain words.These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications.