Vocabulary use during conversation: a cross-sectional study of development from year 9 to year 13 among learners of Spanish and French

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe vocabulary use during semi-spontaneous oral production among instructed learners of French and Spanish at two different stages in the UK educational system: year 9 (near beginners) and year 13 (approximately low-intermediates). The paper mainly focuses on comparing lexical diversity (range or variety of vocabulary used) across languages and across years, including analyses of different word classes. The data are taken from two publicly available learner language oral corpora. These corpora are described briefly, before the details and results of the current study are presented. It is hoped that the oral task, the measures and the results will provide points of reference for teachers, given that there are few, if any, such points of reference currently available.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to the SPLLOC and FLLOC project teams, including Professor Ros Mitchell, Professor Florence Myles, Dr Laura Dominguez and Dr Sarah Rule. We are particularly grateful to Dr Maria Arche, who managed the data collection, transcription and coding processes to produce the Spanish database. We also thank the learners and teachers who were involved in the studies.

Notes

1.FLLOC is funded by UK Economic and Social Research Council award numbers R000223421, RES000220070, R000234754, the Arts and Humanities Research Council RE-AN9057/APN-15456, AR112118 and the British Academy SG 41141. SPLLOC is funded by Economic and Social Research Council (RES-00023-1609).

2.CHAT format is used by many language researchers, and is the format developed by Brian MacWhinney and his team on the CHILDES project, http://www.childes.psy.cmu.edu