A Study Of Productive Vocabulary By English Majors

The present research attempts to investigate the different lexical features in different lexical productive tasks of2nd year English majors. As a kind of cross-sectional study, it is conducted a series of language output tasks, involving a reading-and-writing task (summary writing), a listening-and-writing task (dictation), a reading-translation-and-writing task (Chinese to English translation), and a free-writing task(composition). It intends to testify different levels of English majors are varied in their productive vocabulary, and their productive vocabulary differs in terms of the breadth or depth in different lexical productive tasks. The four tasks are implemented in a fixed time, and all of the participants’ written texts are rated individually by two raters who have received a training before their rating. The data were processed by the programme Range, as well as the software Clawsfour, Foxpro, and Wordsmith6.0, and comparison was made between the high-score group and low-score group (n=31for each group) from four perspectives:lexical distribution, lexical density, lexical use, and lexical errors.Major findings are as follows based on the discriminant analysis:The participants’ productive vocabulary is not large as a whole, their productive vocabulary varies at different levels. Correlation analysis shows that lexical breadth significant correlates with participants’ composition quality scores. Large lexical density is showed in summary writing texts; and high-score participants use more words with paradigmatic relations, and show a proneness in achieving variation of the lexical and syntax than low-score’s. High-score students produce large productive vocabulary in translation, and lexis used in the translations are comparatively different in the number of content words. Comparison between participants’translation and composition reveals that the proportion of content words used in translation is relatively lower than function words, the proportion of high-frequency words used in the translation texts is relatively higher than in the composition texts. Translation texts remain simplified in terms of vocabulary distribution and lexical use. Errors analysis in participants dictation indicates the general language ability of the participants, and high-score participants are found few errors in the dictation texts. From the four different texts produced by participants, vocabulary has been shown as one of the most important indicators of overall text quality.The research findings prove that different tasks like composition, summary writing, translation, and dictation can be an effective method to elicit lexical production, which indirectly enlarge participants’productive vocabulary.Based on the research results, the implications for applying different output tasks will be recommended, this study, to some extent, can encourage the instructor to choose more task types in classroom situations to enrich the chance to use target vocabulary.