A comparative study on the productive and academic vocabulary knowledge of Japanese and Chinese university students : Focusing on the students' performances in the two vocabulary tests 【Report】

This study investigates and compares 143 Japanese and 146 Chinese university students' perfor-mances in two English vocabulary tests, the Productive Levels Test (PLT) and the AcademicVocabulary Test (AVT). Two groups of students are in their sophomore year. In PLT, the correctresponses, and incorrect responses, which are classified into five types of errors that the students madewhen producing 18 tested words at the 2,000 word-level, are analyzed and compared. In AVT, using theVocabulary Knowledge Scale, the performances of the students for the 40 academic words in the twoacademic texts, derived from the Coxhead's 3.5 million words' corpus (1998), are measured and com-pared. The results found in PLT reveal that the productive vocabulary knowledge of the Japanese andChinese university students at the 2,000 word-level is not sufficient to confront the tasks required by theEnglish course for a university student. The results in AVT reflect that the academic vocabulary knowl-edge of the students is mainly maintained on the stage of recognizing the academic words, indicatingthat the students are defective at using and producing the academic words they have learned in theirEnglish writing. In AVT the performances of the Japanese and Chinese students in some of the wordsare found to have significant differences. The influential factors resulting in the differences between thetwo groups of students are discussed in the present paper.