The developing lexicon: The case of Hong kong secondary students

The present study is a part of an ongoing Chinese vocabulary research, which seeks to investigate the lexical development. of secondary and tertiary students in four Asian cities (Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai and Singapore) and to contribute to the setting of literacy benchmarks for Chinese language education in Hong Kong. Vocabulary development is a crucial area of research because it relates closely to cognitive development (Anderson Freebody, 1981; Terman, 1916; Wechsler, 1949) and academic achievement (Miller, 1988; Saville-Troike, 1984; Stanovich, 1986). In language development, vocabulary serves as basic building blocks in generating and understanding sentences (Miller, 1991) and in reading competence (Anderson Freebody, 1981; Beck et al., 1987; Chall, 1958; Graves, 1986; Miller, 1988; Nagy Anderson, 1984; Nagy & Herman 1987). Studies of vocabulary acquisition can therefore provide a window on the process of language acquisition as a whole (Clark, 1995). A large number of teaching and learning strategies have been advanced to promote learners' lexical development, but few of them have given satisfying answers. In contrast to the large amount of published materials on vocabulary learning, little is known about how learners acquire and develop their vocabulary (Nation, 1990). Research into Chinese vocabulary has seen experiments examining aspects of words, such as characters and radicals, but studies into Chinese vocabulary acquisition are relatively under-developed. Hong Kong educational reform has attracted considerable attention and gained mounting urgency in the last decade of the twentieth century because of the unprecedented political changes and their consequential impact on societal goals, education processes and their fulfilment. There is an urgent need to undertake investigations to determine the vocabulary benchmarks of students and to gain understanding on how they develop their vocabulary knowledge so as to benefit Chinese language education. This study aims at helping to meet this need by providing empirical evidence on the lexical development of Hong Kong secondary students by assessing and comparing their word knowledge on the basis of newspaper and textbook corpuses.