Which of the following statements is correct?

In English Language Teaching, a learner's vocabulary knowledge is classified by the language skill it draws on: receptive vocabulary is the set of words a learner understands through the receptive skills of listening and reading, recognising a word's meaning on hearing or seeing it, while productive vocabulary is the set of words a learner can actively use through the productive skills of speaking and writing.

Applying this distinction to the statement “Receptive vocabulary are words we recognize when we hear or see and productive vocabulary are words we speak or write”: it maps receptive vocabulary to the input skills of hearing and seeing or reading, and productive vocabulary to the output skills of speaking and writing, which is exactly the standard listening/reading versus speaking/writing split used to define the two terms.

Checking each of the other statements against this input-output distinction shows why they do not fit:

• “Receptive vocabulary are words we speak and productive vocabulary are words we hear” assigns speaking, an output or production skill, to receptive vocabulary and hearing, an input or reception skill, to productive vocabulary, the two skills attached to the opposite category from what the terms describe.

• “Receptive vocabulary are words we discourse with people and productive vocabulary are words in written text” classifies the two terms by the setting in which a word is used, spoken interaction versus written text, rather than by whether the word is understood as input or produced as output.

• “Words from other languages are receptive vocabulary and words from native languages are productive vocabulary” classifies vocabulary by the language of origin, foreign versus native, which has no bearing on whether a word is being understood or actively used.