From Faible to Strong: How Does Their Vocabulary Grow?

Abstract

Abstract: The study drew on an 80,000-word corpus consisting of narrative texts produced in response to picture prompts by 210 beginner-level francophone learners of English (11-12-year-olds). The unique feature of the corpus is its longitudinal character: The samples were collected at four 100-hour intervals of intensive language instruction, during which time students made considerable progress in listening and speaking. However, analysis of these staged sub-corpora using Laufer and Nation's 1995 Lexical Frequency Profile did not identify the expected increase in use of less frequent words. Further analyses using three measures available at (a Greco-Latin cognate index, a count of word families, and a types-per-family ratio) showed that although the learners continued to use large proportions of frequent words, their productive vocabulary featured fewer French cognates, a greater variety of frequent words, and more morphologically developed forms. Implications for frequency-based vocabulary acquisition research and vocabulary teaching are discussed.

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