Vocabulary Size and the CEFR

Measuring Second Language VocabularyAcquisition

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITIONSeries Editor: Professor David Singleton,

Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

This series brings together titles dealing with a variety of aspects of languageacquisition and processing in situations where a language or languages other thanthe native language is involved. Second language is thus interpreted in its broadestpossible sense. The volumes included in the series all offer in their different ways, onthe one hand, exposition and discussion of empirical findings and, on the other, somedegree of theoretical reflection. In this latter connection, no particular theoreticalstance is privileged in the series; nor is any relevant perspective – sociolinguistic,psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, etc. – deemed out of place. The intended readershipof the series includes final-year undergraduates working on second languageacquisition projects, postgraduate students involved in second language acquisitionresearch, and researchers and teachers in general whose interests include a secondlanguage acquisition component.

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distinguish between students who ultimately gain grades B and C. Thelowest scoring grade A student’s vocabulary is well above the meanscores for the other grades in this data. Notwithstanding this, there is stillconsiderable overlap of vocabulary scores and hopefully this is theproduct of variation in the degree of skill with which learners canmarshal their knowledge when faced with the kind of communicativeand academic tasks that formal examinations present. Equally, it mightalso be the result of the kind of imprecision that subjectively assessedcriteria introduce into the testing system.Richards

et al

. (2008) investigate this relationship further amonglearners of French as a foreign language. They compare not just overallscores on the X-Lex vocabulary size test to the grades that emerge atGCSE and are predicted at ‘AS’ level, but also examine how each 1000word band interacts with these grades. Their results are summarised inTable 8.7.Superficially, it appears that vocabulary size predicts grades in bothexaminations equally well, but the breakdown of the relationship withthe 1000 word bands suggest that the relationship is more subtle. TheGCSE grade is predicted by knowledge of the first 1000 words only andno other frequency band. With vocabulary size so small among GCSElearners, generally less than 1000 words, and with knowledge concen-trated in the first frequency band, perhaps this result is not surprising.AS grades are predicted by all the frequency bands, but the strongestrelationship is with the fourth and fifth 1000 word frequency bands. Itappears that knowledge of relatively infrequent vocabulary is a require-ment of doing well in the AS examination. Richards

et al

. (2008) alsomanage to demonstrate very modest, but nonetheless statistically

0500100015002000250030003500ABCDEA level grade

X - L e x s c o r e ( m a x 5 0 0 0 )

MaxMinMean

Figure 8.1

Vocabulary size and ‘A’ le

v

el grade (Milton, 2006b: 194)

184

Measuring Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

significant correlations between D, a measure of lexical richness, andGCSE and ‘A’ level grades.

Rule of thumb

The better a learner knows the most frequent 1000 words in French, the better he or she is likely score in GCSE French in the UK.The presence of French data placed alongside the EFL data in thisway, raises challenging questions as to the degree to which vocabularysizes, and standards more generally, vary across different examinationsand in the assessment of level in different languages. It is notable thatprogress beyond elementary to intermediates levels in EFL generallyseems to require a vocabulary of over 2000 or 2500 words. The data forFrench as a foreign language collected in the UK suggest that learners atintermediate level, those taking GCSE and ‘A’ level examinations, knowfar fewer words. GCSE is intended as an intermediate level examinationand yet learners routinely take and pass the examination knowing lessthan 1000 words in French. How can this be explained? Does Frenchreally require far fewer words for communicative fluency than English,or is the examination system badly out of alignment? This is exactly thekind of question, and the kind of confusion, that the CEFR has beenestablished to address.

Vocabulary Size and the CEFR

With vocabulary size linked to the level of particular examinations,and as these examinations are tied into the CEFR framework, it ispossible to link vocabulary size to the CEFR. It might be expected,following the work mentioned earlier in this chapter on

Threshold

and

Table 8.7

Spearman rank order coefﬁcients and statistical signiﬁcance of correlations between X-Lex scores and GCSE and predicted AS grades

GCSE grade Predicted AS grade

Adjusted total score 0.43 (0.020) 0.43 (0.020)Raw score on first 1000 0.55 (0.004) 0.35 (0.049)Raw score on second 1000 0.29 (ns) 0.43 (0.021)Raw score on third 1000 0.32 (ns) 0.35 (0.050)Raw score on fourth 1000 0.32 (ns) 0.58 (0.002)Raw score on fifth 1000 0.23 (ns) 0.49 (0.009)

Source

: Richards

et al

. (2008: 204)

Vocabulary Acquisition and Assessments of Language Level

185

Waystage

wordlists, that the scale of vocabulary knowledge associatedwith each level would equate to some degree with the size of these lists.Meara and Milton (2003: 8) have built EFL vocabulary size scores, basedon the results of testing using X-Lex with a ceiling of 5000 words, into theframework. The vocabulary guides they produce appear robust whencompared with the data from learners taking EFL examinations in Greeceand Hungary, described in Chapter 4. The vocabulary scores at eachCEFR level are shown in Table 8.8.While considerable EFL vocabulary knowledge is required to get beyond the initial A1 level, thereafter progress with each level appearsfairly consistent, with gains of 500 words or so associated with eachsuccessive CEFR level. It seems that the CEFR is able to provide aneffective common framework in EFL, as the two countries, one using itsown examination system and the other using the external Cambridgeexamination system, have independently been able to arrive at verysimilar standards where their examinations are placed at the same levelin the CEFR. In many ways, this regularity is quite surprising. The CEFRwas overlaid onto existing examination formats and levels, and littlethought can have been given to whether each successive level of difficulty could be made regular in some objectively measured way. Inpart, this regularity, even across the 5000 most frequent words in English,reveals the degree to which learners of this language have to grow a veryconsiderable vocabulary in order to achieve levels of ability and fluencyin a foreign language. Not all languages need behave this way. Also, thequantities of vocabulary associated with EFL in the CEFR need not bereplicated in other languages. Nonetheless, in the base of English, itappears that learners need to know about 60

Á

70% of the test corpus,some 3000 words or more, before they can progress from elementary(A1 and A2) to intermediate levels (B1 and B2). They need to know about80% of the corpus, perhaps 4000 words, before they can become trulyadvanced (C1 and C2).

Table 8.8

Mean EFL

v

ocabulary size scores and the CEFR

CEFR le

v