2016 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
The creation and validation of productive and receptive vocabulary levels tests
| Project/Area Number |
16K16890
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| Research Institution | Osaka Jogakuin College |
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Principal Investigator |
Mclean Stuart 大阪女学院大学, 国際・英語学部, 専任講師 (10624794)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2016-04-01 – 2018-03-31
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| Keywords | word family / lemma / flemma / vocabulary / testing / bilingual tests / productive / receptive |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
First, that the flemma or lemma, and not the word family or word type, are appropriate written receptive and productive English word counting units for Japanese EFL students. Second, Japanese EFL university students’ ability to comprehend and produce inflectional and derivational forms is dependent on the base word and the number affixes making up the inflectional or derivational form. These findings question the usefulness of affixes knowledge tests as knowledge of an affix does not mean that it can be comprehended with a range of base forms, and when making up word forms which contain a number of affixes. Finally, these findings question the validity of the research and vocabulary tests that have adopted the word family, and the research paradigm that short corpora-derived lists of high-frequency words should be deliberately taught and learned because they cover such a large percentage of the tokens that English language learners will encounter.
Third, bilingual meaning-recall tests (expressing the meaning of the target L2 word in the participants’ L1) are more accurate than monolingual meaning-recall tests (expressing the meaning of the target L2 word with sentences written in the L2). Fourth, bilingual form-recall tests (producing the L2 form from the L1 meaning) are more accurate than monolingual meaning-recall tests (producing the L2 form from a L2 explanation of the target word written). This has significance for vocabulary testing as presently monolingual vocabulary tests are being published without considering the relative accuracy of bilingual tests.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
I have completed data collection for the first three studies as planned. I hope to finish the marking and analysis of the second study's data set by August. My plan to produce a self-marking form-recall and meaning-recall test by the end of the project is moving along well. At present, a first version of the meaning-recall test is available and is being piloted in order to collect a bank of possible answers. A self-marking form-recall test is underproduction.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
During the second year of my KAKEN research, I plan to finish the marking and analysis of study 2. Following this, I plan to publish further international papers with impact factor from studies 1, 2 and 3. Then, using the findings from studies 1, 2 and 3 productive (form-recall) and receptive (meaning-recall) levels tests will be produced. These tests will be made freely available to the public. Finally, an investigation into the reliability and accuracy of the data collected from the productive and receptive tests will take place. At present, there is no plan to change the schedule for my KAKEN research.
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| Causes of Carryover |
I have not used as much money as I had planned at this stage as my school is in the process of paying for the around 100 participants who have recently completed vocabulary tests as part of the data collection for this project. The cost of the data collection is around 600,000 yen and the cost of data marking is around 40,000 yen. I planned to pay for the programming necessary to make the online versions of the productive and receptive tests available to the public. However, I will not have to pay for this until later in 2017 or early in 2018.
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| Expenditure Plan for Carryover Budget |
I plan to use any remaining funds in line with my stated planned use. I will use remaining funds on the collection of data, the marking of data, and on cost related to the production of publically available online self-marking productive (form-recall) and receptive (meaning-recall) tests. Following this, any remaining funds will be used for the dissemination of research results through publications and presentations.
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