The Development Of Junior High School Students' English Lexical Knowledge And Its Correlation With Their Writing Ability

Vocabulary has always been a hot spot of research at home and abroad.Since 1980 s,overseas and domestic researchers have been very interested in the practical use of vocabulary in language expressions and more and more attention has been paid to L2 learners' lexical knowledge.Abundant studies have shown that breadth and depth of vocabulary are closely related to L2 learners' English proficiency and the mastery of vocabulary is the basis to improve their comprehensive ability in applying English.To learn about junior high school students' development of lexical knowledge,this study seeks answers to the following questions: 1)How does junior high school students' breadth and depth of English vocabulary develop over time? 2)How are junior high school students' breadth and depth of English vocabulary correlated with their writing ability?A group of 38 Grade Eight students from a middle school in Guangzhou took part in this longitudinal study voluntarily.Six writings written by these participants over three semesters were collected.Lexical richness(lexical variation,lexical sophistication and lexical density),depth of vocabulary(orthographic knowledge,morpho-syntactic knowledge and semantic knowledge)and correlations between lexical richness and writing ability,depth of vocabulary and writing ability were analyzed by the Statistical Package for Social Science SPSS18.0.The findings shows that: 1)Junior high school students rely on the first 1000 high-frequency words to write,while because of small vocabulary size,they seldom use the 2000 high-frequency words and academic words.Lexical richness in students' writing develops over time.Specifically,lexical variation is improved in different periods.Lexical sophistication increases with the increase of grade,although these changes are not very big,lexical density also increases,though not great.And there are no significant differences among the three semesters on each type of writing errors after Chi-square test which means that the output of junior high school students' depth of vocabulary is not developing.2)There is no correlation between quality of writing and lexical variation,sophistication and density,but there is correlation between quality of writing and types.Some types of errors do not decrease with the deepening of learning.And Errors of morphological knowledge are more often seen than that of orthographic knowledge.Errors in writing effects accuracy and fluency of students writing and also effects improvement of students' writing ability.Based on the above results,the study proposes some suggestions for vocabulary teaching in junior high school.