This study, we can see that Chinese students could not achieve high levels of linguistic competence both for grammar learning and
vocabulary learning. When reading a text, listening to news, or
discussing a topic, learners may incidentally learn some words or
phrases. But the vocabulary is not learned in depth. In other words,
learners may acquire, through communicative tasks, a large number of words that they are able to recognize but could not use productively.
Learners can recognize are far more than those that learners can use
productively. Especially for academic vocabulary which are not in the
General Service List but occur reasonably frequently over a wide
range of academic texts. In most colleges in China, academic English
vocabularies are usually learned through extensive reading both in and out of class. Therefore, knowing a word often means knowing the
meaning of the word when it is encountered in the reading text.
In order to improve learners’ academic vocabulary knowledge in terms
of both receptive and productive abilities, it is very important to
combine learning vocabulary incidentally through communicative
activities with explicit vocabulary learning.