This exploratory study aims at probing into the quantitative and qualitative lexical development of freshmen and sophomores in University of Science and Technology of China, one of the top universities in China. An in...This exploratory study aims at probing into the quantitative and qualitative lexical development of freshmen and sophomores in University of Science and Technology of China, one of the top universities in China. An investigation on lexical size and depth was administered to 76 freshmen who just registered in the university, and 104 sophomores who had finished the college English course. The vocabulary size test was developed on the basis of Paul Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test, whereas vocabulary depth test was based on the lexical competency framework (Nation 1999), measuring the three types of word knowledge: spelling, meaning, and word-class knowledge of six target words. The results suggest that (1) the freshmen had a start-up vocabulary size of about 3800 words and sophomores knew about 5000 words; (2) both groups of subjects had little trouble with spelling, but their grammatical knowledge and meaning knowledge were limited; (3) meaning reception was much better than meaning production, and the reception-production gap widened in the given learning session; (4) correlations between vocabulary size and word knowledge types were relatively significant and changed with subjects' L2 proficiency, and vocabulary size test was not a good indicator of depth of word knowledge.展开更多
文摘This exploratory study aims at probing into the quantitative and qualitative lexical development of freshmen and sophomores in University of Science and Technology of China, one of the top universities in China. An investigation on lexical size and depth was administered to 76 freshmen who just registered in the university, and 104 sophomores who had finished the college English course. The vocabulary size test was developed on the basis of Paul Nation's Vocabulary Levels Test, whereas vocabulary depth test was based on the lexical competency framework (Nation 1999), measuring the three types of word knowledge: spelling, meaning, and word-class knowledge of six target words. The results suggest that (1) the freshmen had a start-up vocabulary size of about 3800 words and sophomores knew about 5000 words; (2) both groups of subjects had little trouble with spelling, but their grammatical knowledge and meaning knowledge were limited; (3) meaning reception was much better than meaning production, and the reception-production gap widened in the given learning session; (4) correlations between vocabulary size and word knowledge types were relatively significant and changed with subjects' L2 proficiency, and vocabulary size test was not a good indicator of depth of word knowledge.
