Assess The Difference Between Active And Passive Language Research

1.4 Active vocabulary knowledge VS. Passive vocabulary knowledge: Many researches in the field of vocabulary have distinguished two distinct types of vocabulary knowledge as Nagy, Richards, and Herman, in relation to the four language skills in which it is used, i.e.: vocabulary knowledge was sectioned accordingly to the types of the language skills, respectively, receptive skills as reading and listening, and productive skills as writing and speaking. Therefore, it was divided into passive vocabulary that refers to the receptive skills, and active vocabulary, which refers to the productive skills.

1.4.1 Passive Vocabulary Knowledge Passive vocabulary knowledge represents the vocabulary we manage to understand when reading a printed item, or listening to something, yet we are not well prepared to use it, i.e.: if anyone says a word in front of you, or you encounter this word in a …show more content…
i.e.: it is the vocabulary we are able to use according to the needed situation, after retrieving it from the memory.
1.4.3. The difference between Active and Passive vocabulary: An example of the difference between Active and Passive vocabulary knowledge is: if someone shows you a 500 DA note, and asks you what is this, of course you will be able to recognize it easily, and this represents passive vocabulary. Thus, if you are asked to give a detailed description to this note, and you are up to describe it, this refers to the active vocabulary knowledge. Another example would be, the word “Asylum”, if I encounter this word in a text, I will probably understand what it means from the context, I’ll imagine it without any difficulty.
Yet, if I want to talk about something that has a relationship to this word, I would prefer to say the place where people with mental illnesses are kept, or simply a psychiatric