An Empirical Study on Vocabulary Knowledge Development of Top University Students.pdf

1、This exploratory study aims at probing into the quantitative and qualitativelexical development of freshmen and sophomores in USTC, one of the top universities in China. An investigation on lexical size and depth wasadmi

2、nistered to 76 freshmen who just registered in the university, and 104 sophomores who had finished the three-semester college English course. Thevocabulary size test was developed on the basis of Paul Nation's Vocabulary

3、Levels Test, whereas vocabulary depth test was based on the lexicalcompetency framework (Nation, 1999) and measured the four types of wordknowledge: spelling, meaning, association, and word-class knowledge of six target

4、words. The results suggest that (1) the freshmen had a start-upvocabulary size of about 3800 words and sophomores 5000 words; (2) bothgroups of subjects had little trouble with spelling, but their grammaticalknowledge an

5、d meaning knowledge were limited; (3) meaning reception wasmuch bigger than meaning production, and the reception-production gapwidened in the given learning session; (4) correlations between vocabularysize and aspects o

6、f word knowledge were relatively significant and changedwith subjects' L2 proficiency, and vocabulary size test was not a goodindicator of depth of knowledge. The results of the study have implicationsfor vocabulary lear