A Study On The Correlation Between Breadth And Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge Of High School Students And English Writing

Among such basic English skills as listening, speaking, reading and writing, writing has been the relatively less developed one of Chinese learners. Studies have shown that lack of vocabulary knowledge is regarded by learners as the most serious problem with writing. It is obvious that vocabulary knowledge is the writers'most important tool. It can be looked at from various dimensions, notably a quantitative and qualitative angle. The former (breadth of knowledge) refers to vocabulary size, or the number of words for which a learner has at least some minimum knowledge of meaning. The latter, depth of vocabulary knowledge, is defined as a learner's level of knowledge of various aspects of a given word. At first, this study reviews the recent research on both vocabulary and writing and summarizes the related theory in the form of illustration. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which depth of vocabulary knowledge, as well as breadth of vocabulary knowledge, is related to writing in second language acquisition. The research questions that are addressed are as follows:1. To what degree does vocabulary knowledge influence the overall writing quality?2. How dose scores on breadth of vocabulary knowledge and writing correlate with each other?3. How dose scores on depth of vocabulary knowledge and writing correlate with each other?Sixty-nine senior two students were recruited for this study. Two tests used to measure two dimensions of learners'vocabulary knowledge were administered. One was a Vocabulary Size Test, which was used to measure how many words the examinees had. The other was a Depth-of-Vocabulary Test, which was designed to measure four aspects of the depth of vocabulary knowledge:meaning, morphological properties, discourse features and collocation. The scores, together with the improvement of the students' writing were collected and analyzed. Pearson correlations and linear regression were chosen as the dominant techniques for the statistical analyses. SPSS and SAS8e were used to conduct analyses on the data.The results reported that scores on vocabulary size, depth of vocabulary knowledge and writing were correlated.While meaning is very important, as the present research shows, vocabulary knowledge can no longer be regarded as a simple matter of recognition of superficial word meanings. Vocabulary knowledge not only has breadth, as represented by the number of words known to a learner, but also has depth. Owing to the results of the study, teachers will lay much emphasis on vocabulary teaching. And it is time that teachers should help students master learning strategies to have a good knowledge of vocabulary. Due to the limited time and research tools, the study on the vocabulary could not cover all the aspects. Moreover, the survey focused only on a high school sophomore, which fails to represent all the students. Therefore, the results need to be further confirmed.