An assessment of L2 vocabulary following an intensive course

István Thékes

University of SzegedDoctoral School of Educational Science

Corpus Linguistics

GSL (West, 1953)

CANCODE

British National Corpus

Main COBUILD

COCA

Lexical Frequency Profile (Laufer&Nation, 1995)

Read (2000)discrete-embeddedSelective-comprehensivecontext-independent – context-dependent

Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1990)

1. bitter2. independent small3. lovely beautiful4. merry liked by many people5. popular6. slight

Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) (Paribakht &Wechse, 1993)

1. I don’t remember having seen this word before.2. I have seen this word before, but I don’t know what it means.3. I have seen this word before and I think it means……………………….4. I know this word. It means……………….5. I can use this word in a sentence:………………………………..

1-14k Size Test (Nation, 2007)

1. SEE: They saw it.     a.cut     b.waited for    c.looked at     d.started

Yes-No Test (Meara, 1992)

1 obey 2 thirsty 3 nonagrate

4 expect

5 large

6 accident

Word Associates Test (Read, 1998)

1. beautiful

enjoyable expensive free loud

education face music weather

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test

(Dunn&Dunn, 1959)

Productive Levels Test (Laufer&Nation, 1999)

1. I'm glad we had this opp…….. to talk.

2. There are a doz………… eggs in the basket.

3. Every working person must pay income t…….

Nation (2001) :

(1) what kind of vocabulary test is the best? (2) is it enough to ask learners if they know the

word? (3) should choices be given? (4) should words be tested in context? (5) how can we measure words that students

do not know well? (6) how can we measure the total vocabulary

size?

Nation (2001) outlined four main trends.

Meaning-focused input

Meaning-focused output Language-focused input

Fluency development

Hulstijn and Laufer (2001) :

Involvment Load Hypothesis

Need

Search

Evaluation

How does a two-week intensive course of English improve on the receptive vocabulary knowledge of students?

Can a short-term course have any effect on students’ productive use of second language vocabulary?

Methods20 students

1.Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) (Paribakht & Wechse, 1993)

2. Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) (Laufer & Nation, 1995)

Vocabulary items were selected from the 2K-5K range

Pre-test

Post-test

135 140150 14590 101

115 126112 11090 80

110 100130 150160 158143 153152 158166 164101 11098 10587 98

107 11068 80

110 11590 95

105 110

Vocabulary Knowledge Scale

Productive Vocabulary Levels Test Pre-test Post-test

22 2416 186 11

20 2122 205 8

30 2924 2719 2124 2622 2421 2319 2027 2728 3121 238 10

18 1917 196 8

The Vocabulary Knowledge Scale test has a t-value of 2,589 (p=0,018).

The Productive Vocabulary Test has a t-value of 5,101 (p<0,00)

The intensive course has had a larger impact on students’ L2 productive vocabulary knowledge than on their receptive knowledge.

Thank you for your attention!