An Investigation Of Receptive And Productive Vocabulary Size Of The Third-year Senior High School Students

As the cornerstone of human languages,vocabulary plays an important role in second language acquisition and research.Scholars have studied the second language vocabulary from various perspectives,and paid great attention to learners' individual factors.As the stage of senior high school is an important transition from compulsory to tertiary education,in which all language skills must be based on a large vocabulary,the size of vocabulary is a most important measure on students' foreign language level.This thesis aims to address the following questions.1)Whether the vocabulary sizes of the senior high school graduates reach the English Curriculum Standard regarding the receptive and productive vocabulary requirements or not? 2)How is their receptive vocabulary size related to their productive vocabulary size? And what are the characteristics of their English receptive and productive vocabularies? Students from two classes of a senior high school in Shanxi Province are tested by a Vocabulary Size Test(VST)to investigate their receptive vocabulary and a Productive Vocabulary Levels Test(PVLT)to investigate their productive vocabulary.Then a statistical analysis is done by using SPSS19.0 to know the current English vocabulary level.The results are as follows.Firstly,the receptive vocabulary size of the graduates is around 3340 words on everage in this investigation,which shows their English vocabulary size basically meets the requirements of the curriculum standards for senior high school graduates(3300 words).And their productive vocabulary size is up to 2360 words which means their productive vocabulary size falls short of the vocabulary requirements of the curriculum standards(2400-2500 words).Second,there exists a big gap between students' English receptive and productive vocabulary sizes.The characteristics of receptive vocabulary include: 1)Due to the individual differences of learners,their vocabulary size is greatly variant.2)The mean scores of VST show a decreasing trend for the frequency levels.On the whole,their receptive vocabulary size increases with the frequency level of vocabulary increasing.Compared with the 1-2 high frequency levels,their performance at 3-6 low frequency levels is generally poor.For those words contained by the vocabulary in the syllabus but beyond the BNC vocabulary lists,only 3% students reach 90% of the words.As for productive vocabulary,the characteristics include: 1)The productive vocabulary is much lower than their receptive vocabulary for high school students.2)Most of the students' productive vocabulary belong to the high frequency word,and their productive vocabulary needs to be further improved.The relationship between receptive and productive vocabulary: the difference between receptive and productive vocabulary is influenced by the frequency levels,and the difference decreases with the increase of frequency levels.In view of the above results,the author suggests that teachers should carry out a variety of vocabulary activities to strengthen the context for vocabulary learning by using a variety of modern technology and materials.They should pay attention to rich and interesting integration of teaching materials to guide students to monitor their own learning strategies.At the same time,students should make clear the levels of vocabulary learning at the present stage,and develop effective strategies to learn high frequency words and low frequency words and to promote the transition from receptive vocabulary to productive vocabulary.