Title: Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language
1Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a
foreign language
- James Milton
- Thomaï Alexiou
2Vocabulary
- 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
3Vocabulary 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
4Please 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.
5Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)
6Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)
7Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)
8Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)
9Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)
10Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)
11Vocabulary learning profile(Meara, 1992)
12Vocabulary and placement
13Vocabulary size and CEFR
14A Greek vocabulary test
- drawn on the Hellenic National Corpus (with
thanks to Dr George Mikros) - derived from NEA a high circulation newspaper in
Greece
15To 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
16Frequency and coverage
17Frequency and coverage
A1 A2 B1 B2
18Objectives
- 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)
19Reliability An individuals scores
20A 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.
21Frequency effect
22Mean scores by CEFR level
23Mean scores by CEFR level
24Vocabulary size and CEFR
25Vocabulary size and CEFR
26Conclusions
- 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
27Next 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.
28References
- 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.