Helmut Daller

Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge: What is in a teacher's mind? Teacher ratings of EFL essays and different aspects of lexical richness

Introduction and overview The findings of the present chapter are a contribution to the discussion on the role of lexical richness within the construct of foreign language proficiency. The present study investigates to what extent teacher judgement of EFL essays can be predicted by measuring the lexical richness of these texts. Thirty-one essays from students on English for Academic Purposes (EAP) short courses were analysed with various measures of lexical richness ( D, Advanced Types, P-Lex, Guirauds Index, Advanced Guiraud and Type-Token Ratio (TTR)). Four experienced EFL teachers rated the essays according to a set of band descriptors that was familiar to the teachers, and is also used in EAP exams. The raters were asked to judge the overall proficiency and a number of other linguistic aspects of the texts. Although the teachers did have different individual preferences in the detailed analysis of the essays, there was a highly significant correlation between them, especially on the overall score (rho >.9), which is an indication of reliable rating. Other studies on teacher ratings of oral texts (Richards and Malvern, 2000; Malvern and Richards, 2002; Malvern, Richards, Chipere, and Duran, 2004: 103) suggest that teacher rating is influenced by the use of advanced vocabulary or rare words. The present study confirms this for written texts as well. In line with our expectations this chapter shows that the measures based on the occurrence of infrequent words are most useful in predicting teacher judgement.

Introduction: Special issue on knowledge and use of the lexicon in French as a second language

This special issue of JFLS focuses on what learners know about French words, on how they use that knowledge and on how it can be investigated and assessed. In many ways, it is a sequel to the special issue on the Acquisition of French as a Second Language edited by Myles and Towell that appeared in JFLS in 2004. While articles on the L2 acquisition of the French lexicon have appeared in a variety of journals, including JFLS, this special issue (SI) is the first volume which specifically focuses on lexical knowledge and use among learners of French as a second language. The issue is timely, because of the growing importance of vocabulary in the SLA research agenda, but also because research into vocabulary acquisition appears at the top of a list of areas in which teachers of Modern Foreign Languages are most interested.