| Summary: | 碩士 === 南臺科技大學 === 應用英語系 === 104 === English education in Taiwan has been gradually geared toward enhancing students’ proficiency to perform real-life functions in English. Aside from English reading and listening as essential L2 input, English writing has increasingly been recognized as a critical ability that should be assessed in the high-stakes English proficiency tests, such as the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) and the Advanced Subjects Test (AST), to create the beneficial washback. This trend on the teaching front, however, does not go hand in hand with the status on the research front, as writing, compared to reading and listening, has not been sufficiently investigated in the EFL learning and teaching context in Taiwan. Aided by powerful analytic tools, the corpus-based approach can delve into writing quality in terms of students’ lexical use profile more profoundly and validly than previously.
This study therefore aimed to explore the relationship among Taiwanese senior high school students’ English proficiency, vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary use in their writing production. To understand Taiwanese senior high school students’ vocabulary knowledge and its association with their English proficiency, 453 twelfth graders of varying English ability levels were recruited from different senior high schools in Tainan. Students’ results of the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation & Beglar, 2007) and their GSAT English scaled scores were collected and analyzed against their performance in English compositions. Moreover, to profile English compositions which are awarded high marks in the major college entrance exams, good writing samples of the GSAT and the AST made public by the College Entrance Exam Center (CEEC) from 2009 to 2015 were also complied as the GWS corpus and analyzed with corpus-based analytic tools including VP-Compleat (Cobb, 2010), AntWordProfiler (Anthony, 2009) and S (Kojima, 2011).
Results of this research would make significant pedagogical implications by empowering EFL teachers to set concrete vocabulary learning goals, and create teaching guidelines to help students facilitate lexical learning and score high marks in the GSAT and the AST.
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