الفهرس Only 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 197 |  |  |
| | | from | 197 | | |
Abstract
Second language vocabulary acquisition is an under-researched area in applied linguistics. The relationship and interaction of the Receptive and Productive vocabulary of second language learners, in particular, is an almost unexplored area in second language vocabulary acquisition. Two experiments were designed in this thesis to investigate how receptive and productive vocabulary change with differences in defining, assessing and learning them. The first experiment investigated the relationship among three types of vocabulary knowledge (receptive, controlled productive, and free productive) within the same individuals. Participants were adult learners of English at different proficiency levels. We found that the three dimensions of vocabulary knowledge developed at different rates and that Receptive Vocabulary was always significantly larger than controlled productive and free productive. The results confirmed that the development of productive, particularly free productive is slower and less predictable than the development of receptive vocabulary. The second experiment examined the degree of difficulty between learning a word receptively and learning a word productively. Moreover, it studied whether words that were learned both receptively and productively were better retained than words that were learned just receptively. The results of the second experiment verified, contrary to expectation, that learning words both receptively and productively leads to a similar level of receptive retention as learning words just receptively. In addition, the experiment proved that productive and receptive learning are interconnected, and that productive learning is substantially more difficult than receptive learning.