The Development and Validation of a Test of Lexical Access Speed
Kazumi Aizawa2012
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Abstract
Although lexical access is considered as a dimension of vocabulary knowledge, a test of such knowledge has yet to be developed and validated. In this study, an attempt was made to develop and validate a test that measures lexical access speed. A tota1 of' 303 Japanese university students and English teachers took the test and the results were compared with overall English proficiency, Further, a questionnaire was conducted with teachers to find out if they considered the test a measure of lexical access speed. The results revealed that although what the newly developed test measured shovved moderate correlations with English proticiency, the test tended to show shorter response times fbr participants with higher proficiency, It was also revealed that the majority of the teachers felt that the test measured their lexical access speed or word recognition speed, even theugh they were not infbrmed of the purpose of the test, 'I'he potential of the test as a measure of lexica...
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TESOL INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL Special Issue-Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Vocabulary
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Estimations of Japanese University Learners’ English Vocabulary Sizes Using the Vocabulary Size Test
Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, 2014
Measuring students' lexica is time-consuming, as one sitting of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) usually takes 40Á60 minutes. As a result, teachers would benefit from being able to make reasonable estimates from commonly available information. This paper aims to investigate: (1) What are the mean vocabulary sizes of students at Japanese universities as a whole, and by university department (hensachi)? and (2) Are a university's department standardized rank scores (hensachi) a useful proxy for English vocabulary size? This study used a cross-sectional design where 3,449 Japanese university students were tested using Nation and Beglar's VST. The results showed an average score of 3,715.20 word families and that VST scores were significantly higher for students in higher department hensachi programs. This current department hensachi was also found to have a stronger correlation with VST scores than with other covariates when the entire sample was considered. Lastly, there appears to be a lack of consistent knowledge of the most frequent words of English, suggesting that curriculum designers at Japanese universities should focus on teaching high-frequency English words. Although the findings support the use of the VST for comparing receptive written vocabulary knowledge between learners, they perhaps do not support its use in establishing a vocabulary size to decide lexically appropriate materials.
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