This study examines how two types of word knowledge, word associations and grammatical suffix knowledge, change over time both receptively and productively. Ninety-five secondary and postsecondary Japanese students were tested on three word associations and inflectional and derivational suffixes for each of 20 verbs, once near the beginning of their academic year and once near the end. The results showed their average vocabulary gain was 330 words. The students showed rather poor knowledge of the allowable suffixes for the verbs, especially the derivative suffixes. Likewise, the subjects did not show very good mastery of the verbs' word associations. Even for verbs rated as known, the students as a group were able to produce only about 50% of the word associations possible on the test as judged by native speaker norms. Word association knowledge and suffix knowledge were shown to correlate with each other and with total vocabulary size. The subjects overall had from 19 to 25 percentage points more receptive knowledge than productive knowledge.

This paper reports a preliminary evaluation of the Y/N technique for producing tests of vocabulary knowledge. The results obtained suggest advantages over the more traditional multiple choice format for testing vocabulary.

the whole, research in the field has avoided the serious theoretical questions that arise once one moves away from this very basic level. A small number of generalised approaches to vocabulary acquisition do exist. Galisson (1970) discusses vocabulary teaching at length, and considers the effectiveness of different types of vocabulary-learning exercises. These ideas are expanded in Galisson (1979). An approach to vocabulary teaching based on contrastive lexical structure is to be found in Holec (1974) (cf. also Dagut, 1977, for a shorter argument on the same lines). Two other large-scale works, Dale, O'Rourke and Bamman (1971) and O'Rourke (1974) are also worth mentioning at this stage. They are both concerned exclusively with first-language vocabulary development, but the ideas discussed are clearly of some relevance to second-language learners. There also exist a number of shorter articles which draw attention to the need for further work on vocabulary acquisition. Marton (1977) discusses the problem of idioms, which he sees as the biggest obstacle to fluent comprehension in advanced learners. Lord (1974) draws attention to the importance of Leopold's (1948) study of semantic development in a bilingual child (cf. also Yoshida, 1978, for an empirical study along these lines). A brief but excellent critique of vocabulary research is Levenston (1979), who reiterates a number of the points made in this paper, criticising applied linguistics for its general neglect of vocabulary learning in favour of the study of syntactic development. Levenston discusses a number of research projects which have only recently begun, and which are therefore difficult to assess satisfactorily. These include Levenston's own work-Blum and Levenston (1978) and Levenston and Blum (1977), where it is argued that lexical simplification strategies used by learners may follow universal rules; and Linnarud (1979), who suggests that foreign-language learners may have characteristically low levels of vocabulary richness compared to normal speakers. (On this use of Type-token ratios as a measure of learners cf. also Webber (1977), Philpot (1977), and Meara (1978).) All these pieces of work are small-scale, however, and none of them adds up to a coherent and impressive body of knowledge at this stage. Apart from these general works, and a few small pockets of isolated research work mentioned above, there also exist a number of fields which have been or are being investigated in a fairly systematic fashion, and are thus important because they comprise the bulk of the work on vocabulary acquisition. B. Vocabulary control The best developed and most systematic work in the field is to be found in attempts to justify the selection of vocabulary items for inclusion in 222 SURVEY ARTICLE courses and examinations on the basis of frequency counts and similar objective measures. This work is too well known to need discussion here. Good summaries can be found in Bongers,

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