An Empirical Study On Factors Affecting The Productive Knowledge Of English Derivatives Of Chinese English Majors

In the last two decades,research on L2 learners' knowledge of English derivatives has shown that L2 language learners have limited mastery of English derivatives,especially the production of English derivatives and this type of knowledge develops at a slow rate.Also it remains unclear how the knowledge of English derivatives,particularly productive knowledge of English derivatives,develops with the increase of language proficiency level.Based on the previous research,this study is designed to examine if the following three intra-lexical factors including frequency of the affix,regularity of the affix and frequency of the word family to which a derivative belongs affect the productive knowledge of English derivatives of L2 learners and also how the productive derivational knowledge develops with the improvement of L2 leaner's proficiency level.102 Chinese English majors from a key comprehensive university in China,at three English language proficiency levels,the 1st,the 2nd and the 3rd year participated in this study.They were asked to fill in the blanks with the appropriate derivatives of 60 prompts in 60 contextualized sentences.All the 26 derivational affixes tested were selected from the list of English affixes at different difficulty levels by Bauer&Nation(1993)and they were at three different frequency and regularity levels.All the prompts and target derivatives were selected from the first and third 1000 word-family lists made by Nation.The results showed that all the three intra-lexical factors tested have a significant effect on the production of English derivatives for Chinese English majors,and the production of derivatives generally develops with the improvement of language proficiency level.