Lexical Knowledge

Łuniewska, M., Hansen, P., Haman, E. (2016). Is there a road to universal assessment of  lexical knowledge in multilingual children? Cross-cultural aspects of Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks. In H.O. Enger, M. I. Norvik Knoph, K. E. Kristoffersen and M. Lind (eds.), Helt fabelaktig. Festskrift til Hanne Gram Simonsen på 70-årsdagen (pp. 147-165). Oslo: Novus forlag.

The present study was conducted in order to identify the relationship among autonomy, critical thinking ability, and lexical knowledge of Iranian EFL learners. 114 male and female learners learning English as a foreign language participated in the present study. The obtained data was analyzed by using Pearson correlation coefficient and One-Way ANOVA. The results of the present study indicated that there was a significant positive relationship between autonomy and lexical knowledge of learners. Moreover, the results of One-Way ANOVA revealed that learners with high critical thinking ability level were the most autonomous learners. Furthermore, learners with high critical thinking ability had high lexical knowledge.

Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention as each individual dimension (Haomin & Bilü, 2017), especially in terms of productive knowledge (Mantyla & Huhta, 2014).
This study analyzes lexis from mid-frequency lemmas in the K3-K9 frequency bands from the learner corpus PELIC (Juffs et al., 2020). Critically for learners, mastery of lexis in this frequency range is essential for achieving the English proficiency required for university study. From these mid-frequency items, a dataset of 7,554 tokens were collected from word families with multiple derivations and manually annotated. The findings showed high rates of collocational and derivational accuracy for the forms learners opted to use. However, compared to expert speaker texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies, 2008-), learners overused the verb forms and underused the noun forms of these lexical items. These patterns provide evidence of the interplay between breadth and depth in learners’ productive vocabulary usage, suggesting that increased lexical depth will naturally lead to greater lexical breadth and vice versa. Pedagogical implications reaffirm the importance of developing learners’ explicit morphological awareness (Ishikawa, 2019) and collocational accuracy (Crossley et al., 2015). Suggestions for mid-frequency lexical items to prioritize in language learning are also provided, with a view to helping learners achieve academic readiness.

Of primary importance to this study was to compare the incidental acquisition and retention of non-lexicalized (NL) and culturally-loaded (CL) words by 90 Persian-speaking EFL learners. An NL word was defined as an English word which despite bearing the same meaning(s) could not be translated with one single word in the learners' L1 (i.e. Persian). CL words also referred to the lexical items which despite the same primary meaning(s) in both languages (i.e. Persian and English), bore significantly-different cultural connotations. The findings revealed that both NL and CL words were significantly different in the semantic aspects of vocabulary knowledge such as meaning and associations. Nevertheless, NL words were more sensitive to the number of repetition. It seems both groups of words may cause extra difficulty for EFL learners. Thus, the researchers recommend that language teachers have a special focus on such troublesome words through an intensive, systematic recycling program.