Korean EFL University Students’ English Vocabulary Size and Their Writing Proficiency

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was two-fold. It was to measure the receptive and productive vocabulary size of Korean university students and to examine their English writing ability in relation to their productive vocabulary size. Ninety seven Korean EFL students at a university located in Seoul participated in the current study. Their vocabulary sizes were measured by the Receptive Vocabulary Size Test (RVST), an adapted version of Vocabulary Size Test (VST) (Nation & Beglar, 2007) and the Productive Vocabulary Size Test (PVST) developed by Shin, Chon, and Kim (2011). The students' essays were then assessed using the ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs, Hartfiel, Hughey, & Wormuth, 1981). The estimates of receptive and productive vocabulary sizes of the students were 7,906 and 5,436 word families respectively, and the overall ratio of the productive vocabulary size to the receptive vocabulary size was .68, which indicated that the students were able to use 68.76% of the vocabulary that they could comprehend. In addition, the result of a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that the students' productive vocabulary size had a significant effect on the four aspects of their writings: content, language use, vocabulary, and mechanics.