A Study on Chinese EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Usage in Writing

Vocabulary acquisition is one of the hottest research fields in English learning, which has aroused researchers’ great attention in recent years. However, their focus is on vocabulary size, vocabulary learning strategies and receptive lexical ability, seldom to productive lexical ability. Writing is an important productive ability for EFL learners, and a myriad of writing researches show that inappropriate vocabulary use leads to inferior writing quality. Therefore, research on learners’ vocabulary proficiency, especially their vocabulary in English writing is quite profound. 66 subjects from a comprehensive university participating in this study, finished one composition for analyzing their vocabulary usage, i.e. lexical richness which includes lexical sophistication and lexical variation. All the data and writing papers were analyzed with RANGE and SPSS 17.0. The findings of the present study demonstrated that the subjects relied more on the first 1000 word level to express their meanings in productive tasks and the lexical sophistication and lexical variation are not high. Subjects with different writing ability have differences in vocabulary usage, but the two groups only have significant difference in lexical variation and not in lexical sophistication. The present study enriches the research on vocabulary acquisition in SLA and provides helpful implications for vocabulary teaching and learning to improve learners’ vocabulary productive ability.