A Study On The Breadth And Depth Of Acquisition Of English Verbs At High School Level

The acquisition of L2 words can be described as a whole continuous system which develops in two dimensions of breadth and depth. Therefore, in the research of word acquisition, we should answer two questions: How many words do learners know and how well do learners know these words? The answer to the first question is usually called the breadth of word acquisition (or the quantity of word acquisition); the answer to the second question is called the depth of word acquisition (or the quality of word acquisition).Researches on the breadth and depth of word acquisition have been rapidly developing in colleges, but no special research has done on verbs, especially the verbs at the level of high school.Therefore, this paper applies the theories and approaches on the study of the breadth and depth of verb acquisition at high school level.In the research on the breadth of verb acquisition, 100 verbs sampled from all of the 800 common ones in West's GSL (A General service of English words) become the objective of the test. And statistical theory and Nation's model of word breadth test is also used in the research. From the test we know: The test-takers in Grade 1 have acquired 504 common verbs, test-takers in Grade 2 546 and test-takers in Grade 3 669. The experiment also shows word frequency of 500 is a demarcation line where the learners'quantity of verb acquisition obviously changes. Hence, we define the verbs below it "difficult words", above it "easy words". The experiment finds the majority of the test-takers' verbs acquired distribute at different levels above the word frequency of 500, which will benefit the teachers when they choose put-in materials.In terms of depth test in this paper, verb knowledge is defined, based on Nation and Zuo huanqi's theories, into four dimensions: meaning, grammar, collocation and function.The experiment proves: the test-takers' verb knowledge is poor on the whole. The achievements of the three test groups are 53% (Grade 3), 39%(Grade 2) and 35%(Grade 1). Meanwhile, the experiment finds the great differences existing in dimensions of verb knowledge acquisition. The learners did best in the knowledge of meaning, better in grammar, and worst in collocation and function. What's more,the differences existing in meaning and collocation, meaning and function as well as the differences between grammar and collocation, grammar and function haven't been improved along with the increasing years of learning.This experiment also applies Paribakht & Wesches'VKS (Vocabulary knowledge Scale) to test, by comparing across the grades, the acquiring process of 5 high-frequency verb knowledge, finding the test-takers' receptive knowledge rapidly increased from the scale "familiar but unknow its meaning" to the scale "sure to know its meaning". However, their productive knowledge increased much less from the scale "sure to know its meaning" to the scale "make a correct and appropriate sentence with it". The experiment arrives at the conclusion: the learners' verb knowledge experiences a hard and slow developing procedure from receiving (recognizing) it to producing (using) it. Its developing route can be described as follow:Contact the word in classroom study-experience the procedure of stimulation, forgetting and memorizing process-acquire the first meaning of the word, the quantity of words increases-the disaquilibrium development occurs among dimensions of knowledge, produce the model sentence given in the class-form the basic framework of word knowledge, the competence of making sentences develops slowly.The experiment shows the fourth level of the process is not only the hardest period for the learners' learning, but also a period in which the learners' linguistic competence develops rapidly. The enlightening is: if we put teaching weight at this level, and try to widen the learners' perspectives of word knowledge, we'll be sure to speed the procedure of word acquisition and qualify the acquisition of verbs and their competence in using language.After the tests, we studied the relat...