2013 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

An Empirical examination of vocabulary depth of knowledge

Research Project

Project/Area Number	24720278
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Multi-year Fund
Research Field	Foreign language education
Research Institution	Kyushu Sangyo University
Principal Investigator	JEFFREY Stewart 九州産業大学, 語学教育研究センター, 常勤講師 (40536306)
Project Period (FY)	2012-04-01 – 2014-03-31
Keywords	vocabulary acquisition
Research Abstract	The current study examined the empirical nature of theorized conceptions of vocabulary depth under factor analytic methods. Four constructs of L2 vocabulary knowledge were examined: Receptive vocabulary knowledge, productive vocabulary knowledge, receptive word associations and productive word associations as scored using a norming group of native-speaker responses. Although an EFA indicated both 3 and 4 factor solutions had good fit to the data (RMSEA=0.19, 0.14), a 4-factor CFA (RMSEA=0.02) showed very high factor correlations between the constructs of receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge (0.85). The combined two factors had a reasonably high correlation to receptive word associations (0.63), but a very low correlation to productive word associations.