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.
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.