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Developing a vocabulary size test in Greek as a foreign language James Milton Thomaï Alexiou 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 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 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. de distance battre absurde achevé manchir Vocabulary learning profile (Meara, 1992) % words known 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 1000 word frequency bands 5 Vocabulary learning profile (Meara, 1992) % words known 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 1000 word frequency bands 5 Vocabulary learning profile (Meara, 1992) % words known 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 1000 word frequency bands 5 Vocabulary learning profile (Meara, 1992) % words known 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 1000 word frequency bands 5 Vocabulary learning profile (Meara, 1992) % words known 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 1000 word frequency bands 5 Vocabulary learning profile (Meara, 1992) % words known 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 1000 word frequency bands 5 Vocabulary learning profile (Meara, 1992) % words known 100 80 60 40 20 0 1 2 3 4 1000 word frequency bands 5 Vocabulary and placement Mean annual progress in EFL school 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 Junior A B C D E FCE Vocabulary size and CEFR CEFR level XLex (5000 max) English French A1 <1500 1160 A2 1500 - 2500 1650 B1 2750 - 3250 2422 B2 3250 - 3750 2630 C1 3750 - 4500 3212 C2 4500 - 5000 3525 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 Words No of Files Culture 3000048 5967 Sociopolitical 3000275 8480 Sports 3000296 10349 Total 9000619 24796 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 Frequency and coverage 100 coverage 80 60 French English Greek 40 20 0 0 1000 2000 3000 words by frequency 4000 5000 Frequency and coverage A1 100 A2 B1 B2 coverage 80 60 French English Greek 40 20 0 0 1000 2000 3000 words by frequency 4000 5000 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) Reliability: An individual’s scores 20 15 1500 1650 1500 1500 1450 10 5 0 1 2 3 4 5 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. estimated knowledge Frequency effect 1000 900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 A1 A2 B1 B2 1000 2000 3000 vocabulary band 4000 5000 Mean scores by CEFR level 4500 estimated vocabulary size 4000 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 A1 A2 B1 CEFR level B2 Mean scores by CEFR level 5000 estimated vocabulary size 4500 4000 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 A1 A2 B1 CEFR level B2 Vocabulary size and CEFR CEFR level XLex (5000 max) English French A1 <1500 1160 A2 1500 - 2500 1650 B1 2750 - 3250 2422 B2 3250 - 3750 2630 C1 3750 - 4500 3212 C2 4500 - 5000 3525 Greek Vocabulary size and CEFR CEFR level XLex (5000 max) English French Greek A1 <1500 1160 1486 A2 1500 - 2500 1650 2237 B1 2750 - 3250 2422 3288 B2 3250 - 3750 2630 3956 C1 3750 - 4500 3212 C2 4500 - 5000 3525 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 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. 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, xiixiii. Wilkins, D.A. (1972) Linguistics in Language Teaching. London; Arnold.