A Study Of Productive Lexical Competence In English Writing For English Majors

This thesis aims to study the development of English majors'productive lexical competence in writing. It can give some advice on productive lexical competence development for English majors and offer some inspiration for teachers involved in vocabulary teaching. The lexical competence of English majors reflects not only in the size of their vocabulary and their word knowledge, but also in their receptive and productive competence. The vocabulary of English majors grows as they proceed from the first academic year to the fourth academic year. However, they can not use their vocabulary efficiently in their oral communication or writing. Some scholars maintain that second language learners can meet fossilization in their productive lexical competence. Moreover, some researchers believe the Chinese English majors can meet the"second-year phenomenon"which is a variation of fossilization.This research has chosen fifty-five English majors as the subjects. They received a test in writing at the end of the third, the fourth, and the fifth terms. The research measures the subjects'productive lexical competence in four dimensions: word richness (composed of lexical variation and lexical frequency profile), derivational affixes, lexical collocation and appropriateness. The students'composition are keyed into the computer and analyzed by VocabProfile to find out the changes in word richness. Lexical variation is indicated by the family/token ratio, while lexical frequency profile is shown by percentage of high frequency words and low frequency words in a composition. The tool of error analysis is used to measure the subjects'performance in derivational affixes, lexical collocation and appropriateness. The errors of every type made by the subjects in the three terms are counted and standardized. The research finds that the four dimensions of the subjects'productive competence have witnessed different changes in the three terms. Word richness of the subjects increased first and then decreased, so subjects seemed to meet fossilization in this dimension. The derivational lexical performance of the subjects kept increasing throughout the three terms, showing no signs of fossilization. The subjects'errors in collocation increased from the third to the fourth term and then leveled off. The subjects'lexical competence in appropriateness experienced a decline from the third to the fourth term and then witnessed a significant increase from the fourth to the fifth term. The research shows that the subjects experienced an unbalanced development in their four dimensions of productive lexical competence, and therefore fossilization or the"second-year phenomenon"is not supported in this research.The research points out that the expansion of vocabulary does not necessarily mean the increase in productive lexical competence. Therefore, both teachers and students of English majors should pay enough attention to the development of the latter's productive lexical competence. More important, with the increase in the specialized courses and the corresponding decrease in language training courses in the third and fourth academic years, both teachers and students tend to ignore oral and written practices. This research indicates that language training should continue to be emphasized for English majors in the third and fourth academic years.