| This empirical study provides reliable data to prove that it is practicable to use semantic-association pedagogy to boost the variation, sophistication and appropriateness of active words by raising language learners'consciousness and activating the associative networks of vocabulary in learners'mental lexicon. Considering the publicly-recognized idea that learners possess much larger amount of passive words than active words, and putting passive words into active use is a much more challenging task than the acquisition of passive words, based on the rationale that vocabulary of a language is an organized network of sense-relations, this current research designs a series of classroom activities aimed at activating subjects'mental lexicon and producing more varied and advanced vocabulary in their free writing. The study adopts the Active Vocabulary List newly issued by Ministry of Education (2004) and categorized into three levels according to different frequency levels. After 16-week's longitudinal research, by establishing a composition corpus consisting of 500 pieces of writing and by means of the modified Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) as the measurement tool involving computer analysis of the percentage of three-level vocabulary and of the contrastive number of word Tokens,Types and Lemmas in each of the subjects'compositions, data is collected and analyzed by means of SPSS software to confirm the hypothesis that, compared with control class, the experiment class make significant progress (P =.00) in the variation and sophistication of active vocabulary, hence enrich the use of active vocabulary in their compositions. |
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