Testing the Quality of Word Knowledge in a Second Language by Means of Word Associations: Types of Distractors and Types of Associations

Abstract

The quality of word knowledge in a second language (L2) and the assessment of it is a growing field of interest. Read (1993) presented a test format that assesses the quality of word knowledge by means of word associations. The present study examined the development of the word knowledge of 2 groups of advanced learners of French as a L2 by means of a slightly revised version of this test format. Three aspects in particular were studied. First, there was the type of distractor most suited to the participants: distractors semantically related to the stimulus word versus semantically nonrelated distractors. Second, the role of the 3 types of associations was distinguished: paradigmatic, syntagmatic, and analytic. Third, the study linked qualitative aspects of word knowledge to quantitative aspects, by distinguishing 5 frequency ranges. The semantically related distractors were found to be more appropriate to assess the quality of word knowledge of advanced learners than the semantically nonrelated distractors. The participants showed a preference for paradigmatic responses, as expected. There was a relation between frequency and quality of knowledge: The more frequent a word, the better the knowledge of the tested aspects.ACCORDING TO NATION (1990), KNOWLedge of a word can be divided into knowledge concerning its form, its position, its function, and its meaning. Thus, it is not the case that a word is either known or unknown. A word can be known in all sorts of degrees: from knowing that a given form is an existing word to knowledge including all four aspects mentioned above. These degrees of word knowledge apply to native speakers as well as to second language (L2) learners. Their vocabularies expand in breadth (the number of known words grows) but also in depth (the knowledge concerning the words already known increases, in other words, the quality of what the learner knows increases).The majority of vocabulary tests concern breadth of word knowledge. 1 There are as yet few test formats that test the quality of word knowledge in an efficient way. Read (1993) and Schoonen and Verhallen (1998) made a start by developing deep-word knowledge tests based on word associations. Both tests assess receptive word knowledge and address, in particular, knowledge about the meaning of a word, the words with which it is associated, and the collocations in which it occurs. Read looked at university students of English and tested their knowledge of "academic" words, whereas Schoonen and Verhallen tested the base word knowledge of 9-and 11-year-old Dutch children, natives as well as nonnatives. An item on Read's test consists of a target word followed by eight other words, four of which are semantically related to the target word, and four of which are not. The L2 learner has to indicate which are the related words.An item has the following structure: edit arithmetic film pole publishing revise risk surface text

Assessing L2 vocabulary depth with word associates format tests: issues, findings, and suggestions

“…* Greidanus et al (2005) further addressed the effect of word frequency on test performance by selecting the target (and choice) words from the frequency range of 5000-10,000. Different from the findings of * Greidanus and Nienhus (2001), no significant difference was found across all the frequency levels (i.e., 6000, 7000, 8000, 9000, 10,000) for all groups of participants. In * Horiba's (2012) Japanese WAF test, all the words were selected from the two higher or more difficult levels of the four levels of words for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.…”

“…A subsequent study (* Greidanus et al 2004), however, produced mixed findings. For the initial version of a Deep Word Knowledge (DWK) test, very similar word frequency effects like in * Greidanus and Nienhus (2001) were observed. An improved version of the DWK, however, overall, showed significant frequency effects only among less proficient learners but not more proficient learners (and native French speakers).…”

“…The lack of significant frequency effects in * Greidanus and Nienhus (2001) for more advanced learners, * Horiba (2012) for Chinese learners, and * Greidanus et al (2005) seemed to suggest that there may be a "threshold" word frequency for a frequency effect to occur or not occur among learners at a certain proficiency level. On the one hand, if test words are highly frequent, such as in the case of those selected from 1000 and 2000 frequency bands in * Greidanus and Nienhus (2001), advanced learners might have developed similarly strong network knowledge for all words within the frequency band(s) disregarding the words' actual frequency; on the other hand, if words tend to be low in frequency, such as in the case of *Horiba (2012) and * Greidanus et al (2005), it might make the WAF test very similar to a test of vocabulary breath.…”

“…In their development of a WAF test for Dutch-speaking university learners of French, * Greidanus and Nienhus (2001) selected the 50 target words and their 300 choices from five distinct frequency bands based on a frequency list of about 5000 words (i.e., 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, and 5000). There was a general pattern that learners scored significantly better on more frequent items than less frequent ones, which was true for learners with different years of studying French in their respective university.…”

A Study of the Effects of Time Lag between Learners' Errors and Teachers' Feedback on the Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge

“…A learner must know all kinds of associated knowledge of each word including knowledge related to its pronunciation, spelling, register, stylistic, and morphological features (Haastrup & Henriksen, 2000;Meara, 1996;Nation, 1990;Richards, 1976) as well as the knowledge of the word's syntactic and semantic relationships with other words in the language (i.e., its collocational meanings, antonymy, synonymy, and hyponymy) (Chapelle, 1994;Henriksen, 1999;Read, 2000). But, most commonly, researchers tend to view vocabulary knowledge as a dichotomy of breadth (how many words are known) and depth (how well is a word known) (Greidanus & Nienhuis , 2001;Read , 2000;Vermmer, 2001;Wolter, 2001) As to teacher's feedback in language classroom, unfortunately, explicit teaching of vocabulary has been almost neglected and research conducted so far have been mostly in writing and speaking areas (e.g., Qian,1999Qian, , 2002Li, 2003). In Iran, for example, only little research has been done on the role of corrective feedback in vocabulary learning (e.g.…”