A Review of Quantitative and Qualitative Studies in Vocabulary Assessment

Since 1980s,articles and works about vocabulary test have piled up one after another,but the methods of testing vocabulary effectively are of widespread controversy.There are two traditional methods in testing vocabulary:quantitative method and qualitative method.While quantitative research sets out from receptive vocabulary size and productive vocabulary size,qualitative research gives priorities to testing vocabulary knowledge in depth.After thirty years of study,achievements have been made in three aspects:the comparative maturity of quantitative research;the steady development of qualitative research and the growing popularity of comprehensive research.Despite the fact that current studies are limited in certain aspects,the trend in vocabulary testing is that context-dependent test are gradually taking place of context-independent test and corpus is widely applied in vocabulary test.