The development of a Difficulty-Based Word List for Japanese EFL learners.

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 18K12479
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Basic Section 02100:Foreign language education-related
• Research Institution: Osaka Jogakuin College
• Principal Investigator: McLean Stuart 大阪女学院大学, 国際・英語学部, 専任講師 (10624794)
• Project Period (FY): 2018-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: 単語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Data was collected from 862 Japanese university students. The students completed form-recall (Japanese to English translation) as part of their vocabulary program. Over 28 weeks on average students completed 2817 form recall items resulting in difficulty estimates of the New General Service List. The correlation between the difficulty of the words and rank in the New General Service List (NGSL) was .45. The correlation between the difficulty of the words and rank in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was .38. The second stage was to produce a free online vocabulary levels test. The goal of this stage was to use the test and pilot the test format and testing platform with 500 words from the first 5000 lemmas of a SubTlex word list. The third stage is to alter the free online vocabulary levels test so it randomly selects words from the target 5000 lemmas. This means with time stable difficulty estimates for the target 5000 lemmas are yielded.

Free Research Field

第二言語習得

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本プロジェクトのデータ収集は3段階で行われた。まず、どの語彙を学習する必要があるかを確認するために日本人大学生862名に28週間、週に最低30項目のフォームリコール（日英翻訳）を完了させ、NGSLの難易度推定を行った結果、語彙難易度とNGSLのランクとの相関関係は.45、COCAでは.38であった。次に、無料オンライン語彙テストを作成した。SubTlex語彙リストの最初の5千レマから五百語を使用し、テスト形式とテストプラットフォームの試験的な使用を目的とした。最後に、無料オンライン語彙レベルテストに語彙をランダムに選ぶよう変更を加えて、時間の経過とともに5千レマの難易度が得られるようになった。