| In recent years much has been done and great achievement has been made in second language vocabulary acquisition. However, there is much to be desired in the study of SL learners' productive vocabulary.This study investigates Chinese High School Students' productive vocabulary in written English, the research is conducted mainly on the basis of lexical richness and LFP (lexical frequency profile) theories proposed by Laufer &Nation(1995).The use of quite a few complicated computer programs(SPSS,RANGE) facilitates the study. The 100 subjects are first-year high school students in two natural classes,who are required to write a composition titled "an unforgettable lesson" within 45 minutes. Two raters read and scored each composition based on the Entrance Examination Scoring Rubric.Major findings are summarized as follows:1. High School Students use 90.07% words in the most frequent 1000 words list and the differences of their productive vocabulary size are significant. After learning for one year,The subjects expanded their productive vocabulary,which was evidenced by their consistent increase of word tokens, word types.The index of lexical levels profile manifested its improvements on the first 1000 word level, which is significant at the 0.05 levels. While the development of the lexical richness was not found.2.There was a significant difference in word tokens and word types between female students and male students,the productive vocabulary size of female students was larger than that of male students, but the increasing rate of female students' lexical sophistication and the third 1000 words was lower.3. Word tokens and word types can significantly predict English writing quality.4. Word tokens and word types are significantly correlated with their English proficiency,while the other 4 indexes of lexical richness have no effect on English proficiency.Clearly,our data are suggestive and more data need to be collected before definitive statements can be made.
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