재중 한국인 고등학생의 어휘크기와 깊이

The size and depth of vocabulary knowledge of Korean high school students in China

The present study investigates the size and depth of the vocabulary knowledge of Korean high school students at Korean International School in Beijing. For this purpose, vocabulary size test (VLT) and vocabulary depth test (WAT) were employed to measure students’ size and depth of vocabulary knowledge respectively. A total of twenty-three Korean International School students in Beijing and twenty-seven public high school students in Seoul took the two vocabulary tests. A descriptive statistics shows that the vocabulary size of the Korean International School students is 25.4, and the vocabulary depth score is 23.3 out of 30. The mean score of VLT and WAT were lower than public high school students’ and there was a statistically significant difference between the corresponding means. A correlation analysis shows that the scores of VLT, the scores of WAT, the school grade of Korean language, Chinese and English proficiency level were highly correlated. Of the factors investigated, the effects of residency and cognates were less pronounced and possibly statistically insignificant but the conditions of Korean language exposure in school was found can be the predictor of students’ vocabulary knowledge. The study results suggest that the vocabulary size and depth are both important factors to explain Korean academic achievement and the proficiency level of second and third language thus researchers need to consider investing more time about vocabulary development of bilinguals or trilinguals in this field.