The relationship between receptive and productive vocabulary of Slavic EFL learners

Abstract This study investigates the relationship between learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge as measured by the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation and Beglar, 2007) and free productive vocabulary knowledge as demonstrated by the learners when writing a short story based on pictures. The focus is on three different areas of productive vocabulary use: lexical diversity (i.e. the proportion of different words in a text), lexical sophistication (i.e. the proportion of advanced words in a text) and lexical density (i.e. the proportion of content words in a text). The results of a bivariate correlation analysis indicate that there is a moderate relationship between learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical diversity of the texts they produce; there is a weak relationship between their receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical sophistication in the texts; and there is no relationship between their receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical density.