First Language Receptive And Productive Vocabulary Acquisition By Chinese-speaking Rural Left-behind Children

The education of rural left-behind children has always been a hot topic of social concern,but their language development is rarely explored,and their vocabulary acquisition is even less of a concern.The existing studies only focus on horizontal analysis,and the longitudinal studies on the process of language intervention are still in the blank stage.The production-oriented approach(POA)centers on the output in instruction and aims at overcoming the disadvantage of “separation of learning from using” in foreign language teaching.Therefore,in order to gain a comprehensive and concrete view of rural left-behind children’s language and effectively improve the output frequency and quality of their mother tongue,this research innovatively takes POA as the theoretical basis and applies Chinese receptive and productive vocabulary as indicators for the longitudinal experiment lasting one semester to investigate those rural left-behind children’s vocabulary acquisition.In this study,two classes were recruited from a private school established for rural left-behind children in Shandong Province: the experimental group(N=33)and the control group(N=32).The EG was intervened by POA and the CG was taught by the original traditional teaching method.The whole research procedure includes pre-test,teaching treatment and post-test.Before treatment,all participants’ initial vocabulary levels were tested by PPVT and VKS.Meanwhile,100 Chinese phrases were selected from the texts that have not been learned in the textbook as the scoring content for the pre-test of children’s receptive and productive vocabulary,and the scores obtained are used as the initial measurement results.In the subsequent teaching intervention,the instruction in EG was strictly conducted according to the teaching procedures in POA,and the CG strictly followed the procedures of the traditional teaching method.After a one-semester teaching experiment,all participants were tested with the same textbook vocabulary as the pre-test,and the scores are used as the final measurement results.By transcribing and scoring all useful recordings collected in pre-and post-test,and putting them into SPSS mac 26.0,this research analyzes whether children can effectively improve their receptive and productive vocabulary learning under the guidance of the two methods,whether there is a significant difference between the experimental group and control group in terms of participants’ post-test scores,and whether children’s initial vocabulary level can significantly predict their later vocabulary growth.The major findings of this research are in the following First,both POA and the traditional teaching method can effectively improve the receptive and productive vocabulary size of rural left-behind children with low Chinese level within one-semester teaching treatment,moreover,POA has a more significant promoting effect on productive vocabulary learning.This result demonstrates that POA can be more effective to facilitate the movement from receptive vocabulary to productive vocabulary,which further enhances their ability to output.Second,data analysis proved that there is an obvious receptive-productive gap in the Chinese vocabulary acquisition of rural left-behind children,and the traditional teaching method focuses on input rather than output,which is to blame for widening the gap and is not conducive to the balanced development of children’s vocabulary.However,POA can significantly narrow down the gap,and there are a small number of subjects whose productive vocabulary size is slightly higher than their receptive vocabulary size.Third,multiple linear regression showed that children’s receptive and productive vocabulary level before entering school can significantly predict their later vocabulary growth,illustrating that the inspiration and education of language and vocabulary in preschool is of great importance,which has profound implications for children’s future language development.The above findings provide some important implications for the theoretical expansion and teaching practice for POA.In terms of the application scope,POA can significantly improve first-grade children’s vocabulary acquisition,which provides an effective reference for future research into other languages and subjects with different language levels.As for the teaching practice,this research can introduce a new teaching method to language teachers,deepen their comprehension of students’ mastery of vocabulary and potential language ability and formulate adequate and effective instructing plans for each student,which henceforth lays the theoretical and practical foundation for improving students’ daily language output.