There are few published estimates of vocabulary sizes amongst students in tertiary education. Research does not offer estimates of the vocabulary size tertiary students might be expected to possess, though estimates exist for K-12 education, some EFL contexts, and the general population. Such research is important. For reading comprehension during…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

Recently there has been some debate about the appropriacy of different lexical units in pedagogy and research (e.g., Brown et al., 2020; Dang & Webb, 2016a; Kremmel, 2016; Laufer & Cobb, 2020; McLean, 2018; Nation, 2016; Nation & Webb, 2011; Vilkaite-Lozdiene & Schmitt, 2020). The lexical unit (word types, lemmas, flemmas, word…

Most common words in English have multiple different meanings, but relatively little is known about why children grasp some meanings better than others. This study aimed to examine how variables at the child-level, wordform-level, and meaning-level impact knowledge of words with multiple meanings. In this study, 174 children aged 5- to 9-years-old…

Research on the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading has largely focused on literal comprehension of informational texts. The present study, however, investigates the vocabulary-reading relationship by specifically examining critical reading skills in an argumentative text.76 EFL university students majoring in Education and…

Designing the Electronic Media instructional innovative management approach on Chinese Language Elementary Level 1 course (CLELC-1) was developed Chinese vocabulary memorization skills of 21 freshly educated students in the Chinese Language Teaching Program, Faculty of Education, Rajabhat Mahasarakham University, Thailand. Using the 10 Electronic…

Sign languages present particular challenges to language assessors in relation to variation in signs, weakly defined citation forms, and a general lack of standard-setting work even in long-established measures of productive sign proficiency. The present article addresses and explores these issues via a mixed-methods study of a human-rated…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

This study explored the effects of three types of lexical tools (MOOCs, E-dictionaries, and lexical concordancers) and three types of lexical applications (technology-mediated communication-based applications (TMCA), Anki as an e-flashcard application, and WordUp as a dedicated lexical application) on learning academic core words among a sample of…

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a structural-cum-communicative approach to the teaching of vocabulary to students possessing a low level of English proficiency. A total of 52 foundation degree students taking a 13-week preparatory reading and writing course participated in the present study. Both the control and the…

A large number of empirical studies have demonstrated the impact of lexical chunks on foreign language learning. However, reliable and efficient use of the lexical approach remains a problem. In this paper, a revised chunk teaching approach, based on Data-Driven Learning (DDL) activities and language awareness theory, is proposed and tested.…

Language learners are underserved if there are unlearned meanings of a word that they think they have already learned. For example, "circle" as a noun is well known, whereas its use as a verb is not. For artificial-intelligence-based support systems for learning vocabulary, assessing each learner's knowledge of such atypical but common…

This study investigates the use of high-frequency cognitive verbs - think and believe - in Turkish L2 learners' interlanguage, both in terms of their verb senses and complementation patterns. In line with this purpose, a Sentence Production Task consisting of context-independent items and a Sentence Completion Task consisting of context-dependent…

The vocabulary research of the 1980s and 1990s brought a breath of fresh air into the language classroom. Teachers in many remote EFL locations had long suspected that vocabulary was their learners' main challenge, but there was little research evidence to confirm this or say what to do about it. Then, suddenly, work by Nation, Laufer, Meara,…

Modern vocabulary size tests are generally based on the notion that the more frequent a word is in a language, the more likely a learner will know that word. However, this assumption has been seldom questioned in the literature concerning vocabulary size tests. Using the Vocabulary of American-English Size Test (VAST) based on the Corpus of…