| Vocabulary is a basic element of language, an important carrier for information delivery and a significant factor in English writing. A lot of scholars gave their own opinions on the relationship between the vocabularies and writing ability from the angle of vocabulary acquisition, however, studies on relationship between the breath of vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary use in English writing have been rare. In view of this, the analysis on the relationship of the senior English majors’vocabulary size and the output of vocabulary in English writing was conducted in the present paper, with the purpose to explore the relationship between breath of vocabulary knowledge, features of vocabulary use and final achievements in English writing, subsequently, and the implication of vocabulary use in English writing is expected to be acquired.In the paper, the influence of breadth of vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary use on the writing score is explained from five aspects which are receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, lexical variance, lexical sophistication and lexical density, with the vocabulary knowledge as the conceptual framework. Through the author’s collecting, analyzing the test results and the TEM-8 time limited training composition materials prepared by the senior English majors, the relationship between the subjects’vocabulary use condition and their writing score on that five dimensions mentioned above was determined. In this study,70 senior students majored in English were first selected as the subjects from a comprehensive university of Guangxi, then, some analysis tools such as Go-Tagger, AntConc, and Range, were employed to obtain the statistics by author’s analyzing the tests results and the composition materials. Moreover, SPSS, a statistical software was applied to analyze the students’ vocabulary size and their vocabulary use condition. Finally, as a result, the relationship between the breath of vocabulary knowledge, features of vocabulary use and final achievements in English writing was determined and the significant factors influence the writing score was demonstrated.Through the author’s analyzing the related data, some conclusions were made:(1) learners’receptive vocabulary size was larger than the productive vocabulary size, however, the productive vocabulary has a significant correlation among its different word levels. For both of the receptive vocabulary and the productive vocabulary, learners’vocabulary test score decrease along with the reduction of the word frequency, it means that the word frequency is an important influencing factor for English writing; (2) learners strongly relied on the 1st 1000 words in their writings and the lexical variance was not so high as expected. This indicates that the students have a tendency of using the low-frequency words and due to the lack of productive lexical competence, the variety of vocabulary using decreases accordingly. (3) the productive vocabulary, tokens and the lexical variance had a significant positive correlation with the composition score, namely, the students in high-score group outperformed those than in low-score group at all level of the productive vocabulary, test length and lexical diversity. This illustrates that the improvement of the vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary application ability is an important way to enhance the English writing score.Based on the conclusions mentioned above, this research suggests that the learners should utilize the inner relationship of breadth of vocabulary knowledge, try hard to turn the ability of using receptive vocabulary into that of using productive vocabulary. Besides this, the learners’concentrations should also be put on the effect of the lexical variance, tokens and the intermediate and low frequency words on the writing score. It is hoped that the present study could be served as a reference for the English majors in vocabulary and writing teaching. |
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