In conclusion, the study shows that Chinese non-English college students have a larger receptive academic
vocabulary size than productive one and their receptive and productive academic vocabulary knowledge are
correlated. The results of the study reported in the paper have implications for the teaching and learning of
academic vocabulary in China. College English teaching used to be characterized by grammar and translation.
With the new college English curriculum, increasingly more importance has been laid on the development of
communicative skills and the ability to exchange information effectively through both spoken and written
channels. As a result, the pedagogical approach to English teaching shifts to communicative language teaching.
Classroom instruction is largely meaning-centered and little attention is directed to language form. However, it
has now become evident that second language learners could not achieve high levels of linguistic competence
from entirely meaning-centered instruction. This is true 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.
Therefore, words that learners can recognize are far more than those that learners can use productively. This is
especially true 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. One example of an explicit strategy for vocabulary acquisition is learning words from a list.
Recent research reveals that list learning of L2 vocabulary can be a very efficient means of L2 vocabulary
acquisition. Thornbury (2002) states that the value of list learning may have been underestimated and suggests
several techniques for effectively using word lists in the classroom. Take academic vocabulary for example.
Teachers can make full use of the Academic Word List. Since the AWL is divided into 10 sublists of word
families, teachers can ask students to work on one sublist for every few weeks. By explicitly learning different
aspects of words (such as their meanings, forms, and collocations) and being exposed to these words in other
areas of their course work, students will gradually be able to use them receptively and productively. Teachers
may also include some vocabulary enhancement activities in language classes. For example, retelling stories,
problem solving and information transfer activities are all very useful for students to learn to use words
productively. Besides, teachers should make students fully aware of the importance of academic vocabulary and
design activities especially for the practice of academic vocabulary.