Research On The Productive Vocabulary Of Masters In English Major

Vocabulary plays a crucial role in foreign language learning.In the past few decades,there have been many studies on productive vocabulary,many of which are about undergraduates.However,previous studies have focused on either non-English majors or English majors,and few studies have focused on high-level English learners--English postgraduates.Therefore,this article mainly studies the productive vocabulary of English major postgraduates in China.Lexical density,lexical diversity and lexical complexity were used to observe the productive vocabulary level of postgraduates majoring in English.In response to the research needs of this paper,the author analyses the text of which the degree papers of English postgraduates and the papers on native language journals.The former consists of 30 English master’s theses collected from CNKI,and the latter consists of 30 foreign journal papers published overseas.The author uses Treetagger to tag,Antconc to retrieve,and Range to calculate the word frequency in order to calculate the lexical density,lexical diversity and lexical complexity.Finally,the data of the two groups are compared and analyzed by SPSS,trying to answer the following three questions: 1.How about the dimensions of productive vocabulary of English majors postgraduates? 2.What are the differences in the use of vocabulary between English major graduate students? thesis and foreign journal papers? 3.What is the relationship among the dimensions of productive vocabulary and what implications we can get for English teaching.The results show that: 1.The present situation of productive vocabulary for English major postgraduates is basically the same as that inferred by previous studies.There is no significant difference in lexical density and lexical diversity between native foreign journals and English major masters,but there is significant difference in lexical complexity.The vocabulary density of English majors is slightly higher than that of other domestic L2 learners.2.Although there is no significant difference in lexical density between masters in English major and foreign journals,both high-frequency and low-frequency words and academic vocabulary of native speakers affect lexical density,while English major master’s does not affect their lexical density.It shows that postgraduates should pay attention to the use of substantive words.3.According to the statistics of word frequency word families,we find that there are some word families such as ASSEMBLE,COLLAPSE,CONTRACT,EXPORT is obviously insufficiently used by the English postgraduates.Teachers should pay attention to such word families in learning and teaching.It will be of great significance for second language learning to narrow the gap between masters and foreign journals.The enlightenment of this study to academic writing teaching is as follows: 1.In the motivating link,teachers can drive more phrases used by native speakers,such as SEMBLE,COLLAPSE,CONTRACT and EXPORT,which postgraduates do not use,and present more vocabulary-related scenes to enable students to complete tasks and practice more.2.Teachers can guide students to choose more tasks related to parts of speech in order to deepen the depth of output.3.In the assessing process,teachers can make students compare words used by native speakers and unused by English major postgraduates,and find out the similarities and differences in order to better acquire them.