Active And Passive Vocabulary Essay

2.0. Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to review the related empirical works to this research and to explore how the present study is aligned with the current leading views in the field.
Mer (1992) stated that vocabulary can be divided into two main branches, which are active and passive vocabularies. Active vocabulary: refers to the words that learners have been taught or learned and which they are expected to be used in different situation. Passive vocabularies refer to those words which a student can recognize their meaning when they see them in a context but can't produce new sentences with these words. He also stated that dividing passive and active words are a hard work since they are closely tied to each other, for example, the active vocabulary may slip back into the passive store if it is not used for a long time, and passive words may become active if a learner uses them

It is important that a student should be in the environment of the target language. Lenneberg (1967) pointed out that environment has a great influence on learning a language and imitating like them them. For example, if specific bird species are deprived of listening to other birds while they are singing it can't sing like them. According to Hyltenstam (2007) there is a special age for learning the second language, it is believed that if a child acquires the additional language before puberty until the age of 12 he talk like a native speaker but when he grow older, the stability of learning would be decreased.
Knowing vocabulary is the key for a stable communication.According to Gordon (2007)developing a rich vocabulary is important for the second language learner and using communication together with literacy skills are connected to the vocabulary. He listed some stages of second language learning, but their duration differs due to motivation, individual differences, and