Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
As is known that vocabulary knowledge is very important in one’s second languagelearning. Because one can learn how to use the grammar of the target language in a shorttime, but in most cases he can not master all the words in the same way. So we can getthe conclusion that the size of one’s vocabulary influence on his language proficiency.In the field of second language acquisition research, the importance of vocabularystudies was not widely acknowledged until the 1980s. For instance, Laufer emphasizedthat “an important aim of second language teaching is to bring learners’ vocabularyknowledge into communicative use” (1997). Since late 1990s, the scholars in foreigncountries gradually found that lexical learning was not only the matter of quantity, butalso the quality of learners’ vocabulary knowledge, and then they put forward “depth ofvocabulary knowledge”. Read emphasized that “second language acquisition isessentially a matter of developing lexical competence in the target language”(2000:136-170) .In China, English Curriculum Standards requests students should master thepronunciation of English words, spelling, grammar, and be capable of using them inpractice. It has set the goal of linguistic knowledge for grade 8 and grade 9 students.English Curriculum Standards requests the senior high school students must reach level 7,meanwhile it claims that level 8 and level 9 are designed for students who are willing to improve their comprehensive capacity of linguistic knowledge.
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1.2 Research Purposes and Research Questions
Based on factors such as English curriculum standards, teaching materials, and theuniversity entrance exam, the research purposes are as follows:First, to highlight the importance of English derivational affix, help Chinese Englishlearners use the effective strategy of learning the derivational affix to expand theirEnglish vocabulary.Second, based on the Error Analysis, the author intends to describe the students’ errors of learning derivational affixes, looking for the affix learning rules and analyzingcharacteristics of these errors, and find the causes of the errors.Third, to verify some characteristics and developing rules put forward by thepredecessors in the process of English derivational affix study, further develop thedomestic research on empirical study of English derivational affix.The aim of this research is to investigate the predecessors’ researches of derivationalaffix of senior high school students’, take their writing as a data source to investigatestudents’ productive derivational affix knowledge. However, considering the students’language level, the affix types that can be examined are limited, in order to show anaccuracy status of the high school affix learning, the author also carried out the two tests(The Receptive Affix Knowledge Test and The Productive Affix Knowledge Test).In the traditional way of English vocabulary teaching, the vocabulary knowledge ismostly taught by teachers, and students absorb the content passively, in other words, thelearners have been turned into a “container” to store knowledge. However, the number ofEnglish vocabulary is over a million, students can not learn all of them in the limitedclass time. So in this research the author attempts to find the principle to help studentsgrasp the strategy of learning vocabulary. All the branch of the studies are related to eachother, so teachers should pay more attention to ability training, and change the one-waytransmission of knowledge to two-way communication, try to evoke the students’motivation.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Development of Vocabulary
The development of English can be divided into three periods: Old English, MiddleEnglish, Modern English. From the Old English Roman culture and Eastern culture,English had absorbed a large number of loanwords and derivatives. Roman culture isbasically an extension of the Greek culture, mainly from Latin. Latin has made profoundinfluence on English. So many stems and affixes come from Latin words. The easternculture is a different branch of Indo-European, but still has Latin blood. In the middleEnglish period, England was under the control of French government, English have gotloanwords from French, and derived many new words. While in modern English period,because of the popularity of English in the world, English has loan words from variouslanguage and form new words. And with the development of science, technology andeconomy, people constantly create new vocabularies. If we review the developmenthistory of English, it is easy to find that English word as the basic root absorbed otherlanguage vocabulary, and then add affix to create new words. So far, English words havemore than 2 million, and memory words in the way of using stem and affix is the mostscientific English vocabulary learning method, as long as we master about 1000 stemsand affixes, and we can infer new words meaning which refers to familiar stems and affixes.
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2.2 Vocabulary Knowledge Framework
According to Richards(1976) who has come up with the question that what it meansto know a word, and what we can use to refer to the knowledge in the process of acquiring words. In order to make a good knowledge of word, he first list the differentmeasures of getting knowledge. And Richards listed eight assumptions:
1) The native speaker of a language continues to expand his vocabulary inadulthood, whereas there is comparatively little development of syntax in his adult life;
2) Knowing a word means knowing the degree of probability of encountering thatword in speech or print. For many words, we also “know” the sort of words most likelyto be found associated with the word…Frequency;
3) Knowing a word implies knowing the limitations imposed on the use of theword according to variations of function and situation……Register;
4) Knowing a word means knowing the syntactic behavior associated with thatword……Position;
5) Knowing a word means having a good knowledge of the underlying form of theword and the derivatives that can be made from it.……Form;
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Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework ........29
3.1 Krashen’s Input Hypothesis ........29
3.2 The Comprehensible Output Hypothesis.......31
3.3 Interlanguage Theory.......33
3.4 Variables of this Study ....35
Chapter 4 Methodology.........36
4.1 Research Questions .........36
4.2 Subjects....37
4.3 Instruments ....37
4.4 Procedures for Collecting the Data....40
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion ....43
5.1 The Description of Derivational Affix Errors in the Two Tests........43
5.2 Affix Acquisition Order ........47
5.3 Features of Affix Acquisition of the Two Grades .....52
5.4 The Description of Derivational Affix Errors in the Compostions .........53
5.5 The Causes of English Derivational Affix Errors .....56
5.6 Summary........59
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion
5.1 The Description of Derivational Affix Errors in the Two Tests
This study intends to study the total 32 affixes, intend to test learners of the 32 affixaccept ability and output ability. In the test of 32 productive text, productive affixidentification number is in an average of 15.4, the maximum number is 25, the minimumis 9; In 32 receptive test, receptive affix identification number in an average number is18.09, the maximum number is 29, the minimum number is 6.In test of the 64 affixes, affix identification number is 32.22 on average, those themaximum number is 51, minimum number is 16. In the text of 32 prefix, the students hasan average of the prefix identification number is 8.93, and the maximum number is 21,the minimum number is 4; 32 suffixes in the test, the suffixes identification to an averagenumber is 22.41, and the maximum number is 31.
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Conclusion
This chapter can be divied into three parts: the first part shows the major findings inthis study; the second part lists the implications; and the third part summarizes thelimitations and gives some suggestions for further studies. The research has found that the subjects have acquired 71% of the affix. Theirmastery of affix still needs to be improved. A feature can be easily found that the ratio ofreceptive mastery to productive mastery is 87% to 55% among all subjects. That is to say,the subjects’ receptive and productive ability are extremely unbalanced. Receptivemastery of affix is about 1.58 times more than the productive mastery of affix. As awhole, the extent of receptive affix knowledge is higher that that of productive affixknowledge either in senior one or senior two. The superiority of receptive affixknowledge reflects students’ cognitive characteristics, information process as well astheir learning environment in the second language acquisition .
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Reference (omitted)