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Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language

Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language. James Milton Thoma ï Alexiou. Vocabulary. the core component of all the language skills (Long and Richards, 2007, xii)

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Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language

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  1. Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language James Milton Thomaï Alexiou

  2. Vocabulary • the core component of all the language skills (Long and Richards, 2007, xii) • without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed (Wilkins, 1972, 111) • But formal tools to model and measure vocabulary knowledge are very recent • and mainly restricted to EFL

  3. Vocabulary Size Estimates tend to… • Sample of the most frequent vocabulary • the most frequent vocabulary tends (but only tends) to be learned earliest (Alexiou & Konstantakis, forthcoming) • the most frequent vocabulary gives greatest coverage (and comprehension) • textbook neutral (unless they are very odd) • give reliable, believable estimates of a learner’s knowledge • But • underestimate

  4. Please look at these words. Some of these words are real French words and some are invented but are made to look like real words. Please tick the words that you know or can use. Here is an example.  chien Thank you for your help.

  5. Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)

  6. Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)

  7. Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)

  8. Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)

  9. Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)

  10. Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)

  11. Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)

  12. Vocabulary and placement

  13. Vocabulary size and CEFR

  14. A Greek vocabulary test • drawn on the Hellenic National Corpus (with thanks to Dr George Mikros) • derived from NEA a high circulation newspaper in Greece

  15. To give us a workable frequency list to draw items from… • proper names and other named entities stripped out • corpus is lemmatised • common inflections work differently in English and in Greek • But this process brings the corpus into line with the English and French corpora and makes them more similar • most frequent 5000 words taken as the basis of a test equivalent to the EFL and French tests shown • 20 words from each 1000 word frequency band • 20 pseudo-Greek words

  16. Frequency and coverage

  17. Frequency and coverage A1 A2 B1 B2

  18. Objectives To examine: • whether the test is reliable • whether the frequency effects observable in other language can be seen in Greek • whether the frequency profile changes with level and knowledge in the expected manner • whether the test differentiates between learners of different levels in predictable ways (and suggests vocabulary knowledge required for each CEFR level)

  19. Reliability: An individual’s scores

  20. A larger pilot study • 64 adult students • Learning Greek in Thessaloniki at the School of Modern Greek • From 1 month to 2 years • They were tested end of October • Ranked at 4 CEFR levels • A1 • A2 • B1 • B2 Many Thanks go to Mrs MarthaVazaka, her colleagues and the students.

  21. Frequency effect

  22. Mean scores by CEFR level

  23. Mean scores by CEFR level

  24. Vocabulary size and CEFR

  25. Vocabulary size and CEFR

  26. Conclusions • This frequency based vocabulary size testin Greek as a foreign language is very workable • The test successfully distinguishes between learners at different levels of the CEFR framework and appears to give believable figures for learners’ level of vocabulary knowledge • The figures seem to mesh well with the predictions for vocabulary suggested by the coverage obtained from the frequency data

  27. Next steps • This study is a first step in validating this testing tool and in order to confirm its reliability, we intend to carry out more tests at the end of this academic year. • We also have some supporting evidence that by using coverage figures drawn from word frequencies, we can tie the CEFR levels to vocabulary sizes in a whole variety of languages other than English, French and Greek. And that should help to make the CEFR system both more robust and more transparent.

  28. References • Alexiou, T. & Konstantakis, N. ‘Lexis for Young Learners: Are we heading for frequency or just common sense?’, Selection of papers for the 18th Symposium of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. • Meara, P. (1992) EFL Vocabulary Tests. University College Swansea: Centre for Applied Language Studies. • Long, M.H. and Richards, J.C. (2007) Series Editors’ Preface. In Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge. Cambridge; Cambridge University press, xii-xiii. • Wilkins, D.A. (1972) Linguistics in Language Teaching. London; Arnold.

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