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Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language

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Title: Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language


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
    learners 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 individuals 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 test in
    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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