The Correlation Between EFL Learners' Productive Vocabulary Cognition And The Result Of Moe Spoken English Test

As an important aspect of foreign language learning,correlation between vocabulary knowledge and language ability has been explored in many researches,which mainly concentrated on two aspects:one is vocabulary size and language ability,and the other is vocabulary knowledge depth and language ability.And both of them focused on receptive vocabulary knowledge.Over the past few centuries,great achievements have already been made in the former.However,researchers have not paid too much attention to the latter.Therefore,this paper investigated the correlation between productive vocabulary knowledge cognition and spoken English proficiency on the basis of vocabulary knowledge framework of Nation?1990,2001?.The research was conducted on 61 students in School for Study Overseas in Xi'an International Studies University,who were trained for three months in this program in English before going abroad.Two instruments were involved:?a?depth of productive vocabulary knowledge test and?b?spoken English test organized by Ministry of Education.In productive vocabulary knowledge depth test,20high-frequency productive words were tested from four dimensions:affix,synonym,antonym and collocation.Based on the data collected,the present study attempts to deal with the following issues:whether there is correlation between productive vocabulary cognition and spoken English proficiency;whether there are differences in the correlation between the four types of vocabulary knowledge,affix,synonym,antonym,collocation and spoken English proficiency;whether the four types of vocabulary knowledge,affix,synonym,antonym and collocation,have an independent ability in accounting for variance in spoken English proficiency and how much of the variance is accounted for by the predictors.Through statistical analysis for the data collected,we got the following conclusions:there is correlation between productive vocabulary cognition and spoken English proficiency(r_DPVK-SET=.466);there are differences in the correlation between the four types of vocabulary knowledge and spoken English;each of the four types of vocabulary depth knowledge can independently account for the variance in spoken English proficiency,with 6.1%,5.9%,4.9%and 10.5%for affix,antonym,synonym and collocation respectively.The significance of the present study are reflected mainly in three aspects:empirical data of productive vocabulary research,language teaching as well as vocabulary learning.