| "Lexical Richness", which reflects the degree of richness of lexical use in speech production, is a very important aspect in vocabulary knowledge and has significant meaning to the study of language acquisition and other linguistic subjects. When writing, high school students tend to conceive the thought in mind in mother tongue (Chinese) and then try to seek and convey the idea with corresponding English vocabularies and structures. However, their inadequate vocabularies and failing to apply learned vocabularies flexibly to writing tasks result in their dull content. This experiment, where totally 78 subjects from 2 parallel classes of Senior Ⅱ are involved, aims at developing students’ lexical richness in writing by strengthen productive learning of target word. In each unit, a set of exercises are designed in which target vocabularies are covered. The exercises consist of unit reading summary, making sentences, cloze, translating short paragraphs from Chinese into English, etc. Above all, unit thematic writings are designed in particular which are helpful for integrating target vocabularies into writing with the aim of developing lexical richness. The specific research questions are as follows:1. What are the problems that senior school students are faced with lexical richness in English writing?According to the pre-study questionnaire, the most challenging problem when senior high school get down to writing is their inadequate vocabulary, which makes their written work lexical dullness, typical of repetition of high frequency vocabularies.2. Can productive learning of target words develop students’ lexical richness in writing?There are two classes are involved in the study. One is an experimental class where productive learning of target word is conducted while the other one is a control class where mainly receptive learning of target words is carried out. According to the statistics of SPSS, after study, students in the experimental class made more progress in lexical richness than those in control class.3. To what extent that lexical richness in writing has been developed over an academic semester of study?After one academic term of 5 month, the tokens of composition in both groups are lengthened.The average of tokens in experimental class is 124 while in the control class students produce 87 tokens on average. Besides the frequency of using academic words and low frequency words in experimental class grow more rapidly than those in control class.According to the result of statistics, among the 4 components of lexical richness, lexical variation decreases in experimental class. As far as lexical density is concerned, the productive learning of target vocabularies has no significant effect on the improvement of it. In terms of lexical sophistication and lexical originality, it does have great influence upon both, whose development will contribute to the improvement of writing quality. |
