Over the last 20 years vocabulary research has grown from a Cinderella subject to a position of some importance. Vocabulary is now considered integral to just about every aspect of language knowledge and is a lively and vital area of research and innovation. With this development have come standard and widely-used tests, such as vocabulary size and lexical richness measures, and commonly accepted metaphors, such as the mental lexicon as a web of words. Less widely known outside academic circles, however, is the extensive work on learners' lexis and the utility, reliability and validity of the tests we use to measure and investigate it. This volume brings together contributions from internationally-renowned researchers in this field to explain much of the background to study in this area. It introduces to a wider audience the concerns, the newest approaches and developments in the field of vocabulary research and testing.
Author(s): Helmut Daller, James Milton, Jeanine Treffers-Daller
Edition: 1
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 288
Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge......Page 4
Contents......Page 6
Contributors......Page 8
Abbreviations......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Series Editors' Preface......Page 13
Editors' introduction......Page 16
PART I: FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES......Page 48
Fundamental issues in modellingand assessing vocabulary knowledge......Page 50
PART II: VOCABULARY AND LEARNER DIFFERENCES......Page 60
Lexical profiles, learning styles and the construct validity of lexical size tests......Page 62
Learners' response behaviour in Yes/No Vocabulary Tests......Page 74
PART III: THE UNIT OF ASSESSMENT AND MULTIPLE VOCABULARY MEASURES......Page 92
Validity and threats to the validity of vocabulary measurement......Page 94
Comparing measures of lexical richness......Page 108
Productive vocabulary tests and the search for concurrent validity......Page 131
Exploring measures of vocabulary richness in semi-spontaneous French speech......Page 148
Lexical richness and the oralproficiency of Chinese EFLstudents......Page 165
PART IV: METAPHORS AND MEASURES IN VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE......Page 180
Implementing graph theory
approaches to the exploration of
density and structure in L1 and L2
word association networks......Page 182
Insights into the structure of L1
and L2 vocabulary networks:
intimations of small worlds......Page 197
PART V: VOCABULARY MEASURES IN USE......Page 220
Assessing vocabulary for the purpose of reading diagnosis......Page 222
The best of both worlds? Combined
methodological approaches to the assessment
of vocabulary in oral proficiency interviews......Page 221
What is in a teacher's mind?......Page 249
References......Page 260
Appendix 1......Page 278
Appendix 2......Page 280
Appendix 3......Page 282
Appendix 4......Page 283
Index......Page 284
