ESL Written development at home and abroad: taking a closer look at vocabulary

ABSTRACT

The present study examines the development of second language (L2) vocabulary in writing comparing two different learning contexts, formal instruction (FI) at home followed by a 3-month stay abroad (SA). Data were obtained from a group of 30 Catalan/Spanish advanced learners of English before and after each learning period by means of a written composition. These compositions were analyzed quantitatively in terms of lexical measures in various domains, such as diversity, density, sophistication and accuracy. Baseline data from 29 native speakers of English, elicited through the same task, were also used for comparison purposes. Our results reveal that the different aspects of lexical proficiency in L2 writing do not develop in the same manner across the two learning contexts. While SA is particularly beneficial for lexical diversity, lexical accuracy seems to flourish after both FI and SA learning periods. Learners also achieve more native-like behaviour in terms of spelling and lexical sophistication after SA. These findings are interpreted together with the relevance of the selected measures used in the study.

KEYWORDS:

• Study abroad
• second language writing
• vocabulary acquisition
• ESL

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the members of the SALA research team and the students who collaborated in the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Type/token ratio (TTR) has been seen to be highly sensitive to text length (i.e. total amount of words) in L2 vocabulary research. As text length increases, TTR logically decreases thus potentially invalidating comparisons between samples with different text length (Vermeer 2004).

2 Because there was no formal English language instruction at the university level during the third term of Year 1, T2 data were collected immediately after the second term of Year 1. The SALA project data collection was organized around the university’s schedule, following a trimester system, and was highly dependent on its curriculum.

3 The average values of lexical density as produced by the NNSs and NSs (baseline) were the following (Standard deviations in parentheses):

Table

Additional information

Funding

This research received financial support through HUM2004-05442-c02-01, HUM2007-66053-C02-01/02 and FFI2010-21483-C02-01/02 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and ALLENCAM (SGR2005-01086/2009-140) from the Catalan Government.

Notes on contributors

Victoria Zaytseva

Victoria Zaytseva holds a PhD in Linguistic Communication and Multilingual Mediation from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her main research interests include second language vocabulary acquisition with a special focus on context effects (formal instruction and study abroad).

Imma Miralpeix

Imma Miralpeix obtained her PhD from the University of Barcelona, Spain where she is Lecturer and Researcher. Her main research interests entail L2 vocabulary acquisition, especially lexical development and assessment, and multilingualism. She is the author of several publications in these areas and has taken part in different funded projects on second language learning and teaching.

Carmen Pérez-Vidal

Carmen Pérez-Vidal is an accredited Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she teaches English Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition since 1995. Her main research interests entail child bilingualism, and EFL acquisition, particularly in different learning contexts. Since 2004 she has been principal investigator of the Study Abroad and Language Acquisition (SALA) project.