An Exploration Into The Development Of Lexical Competence Of English Majors

Over the last decades, vocabulary has been, both in L1and L2language acquisition,upgraded as a component of language proficiency, but vocabulary knowledge is now seenas the most important factor in judging learners’ language proficiency. Researches showthat L2learners lack productive vocabulary knowledge in writing. Actually, there is certaindifference between receptive vocabulary knowledge and productive vocabulary knowledgefor L2learners are unable to put some words into practice correctly and effectively even ifthey are able to recognize them.The development of lexical competence contains the development of both vocabularyknowledge and the capability of applying what one knows of vocabulary. In recent years,the study about lexical competence can be divided into two types:1) the attempt to probeinto the concept of “lexical competence” in theory and the mental process of vocabularyacquisition and2) the process of learners’ vocabulary acquisition through fieldinvestigation. We find, from these two types of researches, that most researchers intend toanswer the question how one can put into practice what he has mastered of a word. In fact,researchers have different views for the definition of “lexical competence”. After theintroduction of a variety of definition of lexical competence, we are of the opinion thatlexical competence involves four progressing dimensions with both differences andrelation, namely the breadth dimension, the depth dimension, the precision dimension andthe automaticity dimension.Thirty students from English majors in Ningbo University are chosen for this studyand they are divided into three groups (10people in each group) according to theiracademic performance in the course Comprehensive English in the first semester. Thepaper analyzes their composition in five terms from2007-2009from the perspectives ofthe acquisition of affixes (a total of26prefixes and suffixes) and idioms which contain thehigh-frequency verbs (namely, make, take, get, turn and give) so as to explore thedevelopmental characteristics and regularities of lexical competence on the part of ChineseEnglish majors.The research yields the following findings:(1) The acquisition of affixes in threegroups goes as follows: the second group uses910times of affixes while the first groupand the third group use899times and842times respectively; students from three groupsuse prefixes re-, ex-, in-and suffixes-al,-ment,-ly,-ity most frequently while prefixes counter-, non-, post-,anti-, ante-and suffixes-ism,-ish are never used;(2) in respect of idiomacquisition, the first group reaches a total of144(44idioms), while129(43idioms) and110(42idioms) are found respectively for the second and third group. Students amongthree groups altogether use182take-including idioms, but turn-including idioms are onlyused for15times. Thus there is difference in the breadth but little variation in the depth ofhigh-frequency idioms with verbs (take, make, get, turn, give) among the three groups.Research findings point to the fact that the third group lies at the bottom both in affixes andidiom acquisition, which proves that lexical competence is strongly associated with solidfoundation of knowledge of learners themselves.In short, this research has a certain implication for methodology and teaching practice.Teachers should search optimal methods continuously to improve the instruction ofvocabulary, aiming at encouraging students to use new words as frequently as possibleduring the language production, deepening the depth of lexical knowledge, andaccelerating the process of transformation from receptive words into productive ones so asto enable students to acquire English words in an efficient way in the classroom setting.