Measuring L2 Receptive and Productive Vocabulary Knowledge

Abstract

What does it mean to know a word? Most learners and teachers would agree that knowing a word is being able to recognise it (receptive knowledge) and to use it correctly (productive knowledge). This paper reviews the notion of receptive and productive knowledge, also referred to as passive or active knowledge. Despite their importance to our understanding of lexical development, these two components of vocabulary knowledge have been assigned different degrees of significance by researchers. The reasons for such ambiguity and the relevance of these two notions to vocabulary learning are discussed below, with a description of the tests that have been designed and used to measure productive/receptive knowledge and of their possible impact on teaching.

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