3K-LEx. Desarrollo y validación de una prueba de amplitud léxica en español

Receptive vocabulary knowledge in L2 learners of Spanish: The role of high‐frequency words

“…Each version contains 162 items: 108 real words (36 words from each 1000‐frequency band) which were randomly selected from Davies and Davies (2017) Spanish lemmatized frequency dictionary; and 54 pseudowords. Pseudowords were used to penalize students who recognize pseudowords as real ones, as this may indicate a lack of attention to the task (for a broader description of the test format, see Robles‐García, 2020). Although both tests offer similar results and could thus be used interchangeably, research shows that increasing the number of items results in a better estimation of the students' lexical knowledge (Gyllstad et al, 2015), and such constant increase seems to taper off after 70 items (McLean et al, 2020).…”

“…Fifteen words might be an overly ambitious goal, as instructors cannot focus solely on vocabulary learning in the classroom. However, eight words might not be enough since more than 25% of the words from the 3000 most frequent ones are English–Spanish cognates (Robles‐García, 2020). Thus, a simple calculation of the average between the two lowest proposed figures (8 and 12), suggests that 10 words per session could be a feasible number to teach in language courses.…”

“…To address this issue, the present study examines students' receptive knowledge of the 3,000 most frequent words among L2 students of Spanish at various levels in a university Spanish program in the United States. Such receptive knowledge will be measured using 3K‐LEx (Robles‐García, 2020), a recently published yes / no lexical decision test that measures knowledge of the first 3000 words in Spanish and that is feasible for all types of learners regardless of their language proficiency.…”