Assessing Lexical Accessibility : A Critical Review of Three Extant Tests and a New Approach.

概要

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Vocabulary knowledge is the basis of language ability. For learners, increasing the number of words and phrases they know is the most important thing they can do to improve their ability. However, lexical competence involves much more than simply memorizing long lists. All words have various aspects of knowledge. Some examples are syntactic and semantic behavior, derivations, active and passive knowledge, collocations and the network of associations and knowledge of polysemy. (e.g.Richards, 1976; Melka, 1997) However, for a typical inter-mediate learner who knows several thousand head words, assessing the overall state of her vocabulary knowledge would be impossible if all these aspects were taken into account.Understandably, teachers often rely on one-time vocabulary tests of L2-L1 translation knowledge. But since such tests constitute only a tiny fraction of known words and target only one facet of knowledge, they reveal little about the overall state of lexical development. Moreover, the development of lexical competence is not linear or monotonic. It progresses in spurts and regresses with disuse, as any committed language learner has experienced. Clearly, sensitive, practical testing tools are needed to assess the various facets of L2 lexical ability. This paper will deal with the testing of L2 word recognition ability.
2007-03-30