A Study On Affix Acquistion Of Chinese Non-English Major College Students

Vocabulary knowledge is an indispensable part of language proficiency,and affix knowledge is considered to be an important aspect of vocabulary knowledge. The knowledge of affix is of great importance to both language learners and language teachers.Among theoretic explorations and empirical studies of vocabulary study on vocabulary knowledge, the new tendency is the changing of the study focus from vocabulary size, the"width of vocabulary acquisition"to"depth", various types knowledge related to a word (pronunciation, spelling, meaning, collocation, class, association, etc.).This study expatiated the theories on vocabulary and affix knowledge acquisition, and analyzed the present situation of the subjects'affix acquisition. It is an attempt to describe some rules and factors functioning in the acquisitional process of Chinese non-English major college students. Because of the feasibility limited by time, finance and other factors, the survey could only be of a rather small scale and will be carried out in Jiangsu University, which may characterize to some extend the situation of Chinese non-English major college students'affix acquisition by revealing from their level of receptive and productive mastery of various component types of affix knowledge.Based on revision of Richards' and Nation's Vocabulary Knowledge Frameworks, the Continuum Theory contributed by Wesche & Paribakht (1996) Schmitt & Meara (1997), Verhallen & Schoonen(1998), Laufer & Paribakht(1998), Bloom (1997), and Acquisition Order Hypothesis suggested by Dulay and Burt (1973,1974), Rod Ellis(1994), Krashen (1994), Mochizuki (2000), and empirical studies on affix acquisition conducted by Schmitt & Meara (1997), Schmitt (1998), Richards (1976), Nation (1990), Bauer and Nation (1993),Mochizuki (1998a), Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000), Linda D. Jarmulowicz (2001),Raymond Bertram et al (2000),Wu Xudong & Chen Xiaoqing(2000) and Liu Shaolong (2001, 2002), we intended to explore the following research questions:(1) What is the present situation of the subjects' affix acquisition and vocabulary size?(2) What is the relationship between the acquisition of affix knowledge and vocabulary size?(3) Are there any differences between the receptive mastery and productive mastery of affix knowledge, and between prefix and suffix within learner of same level? If so, how might the differences be described?(4) How do the various types of affix knowledge and the ability of using the knowledge (receptive and productive mastery of affix knowledge) develop as the learners' overall L2 proficiency improves?(5) Is there a certain order of affix acquisition through different proficiency order, what is the order?The subjects are four classes of non-English major students, 30 students of each group representing students of four grades, freshmen, sophomores, juniors and first-year postgraduates in Jiangsu University, to identify a certain order of affix acquisition through different proficiency levels, so as to shed light on affix acquisition as well as second language acquisition as a whole, and to better guide the classroom affix learning and teaching.The instruments we applied are: 1) The Vocabulary Size Test, which is originally designed by Nation (1983, 1990), and now revised and expanded and presented validity evidence by Ma Guanghui (2004), 2) The Receptive Affix Knowledge Test, which is originally designed by Mochizuki's (2000) Affix Knowledge Test, and we made a little revision, 3) The Productive Affix Competence Test, in which we designed the questions on the same affixes in receptive knowledge test.A pilot study with small number of subjects was made to test the validity and reliability of the instruments before the vast distribution of test papers.After the scoring of the data, the results were analyzed statistically on computer by the SPSS 14.0, we got some findings to our research questions, the overall situation of subjects'vocabulary size and affix knowledge, tendency feature of subjects'vocabulary size and affix knowledge among different levels, correlations between vocabulary size and types of affix knowledge, and affix acquisition order was presented. We analyzed and discussed theoretically the findings, and some tentative suggestions were made for classroom affix teaching and learning. Finally, the limitations of the present study were stated and the suggestions for further studies were put forward.