The relationship between TOEFL vocabulary items and meaning, association, collocation and word-class knowledge

In this paper the author argues that issues of construct validity should be given more prominence in the validation of lexical test items. One way of determining the construct validity of vocabulary items is to interview subjects directly after taking the items to ascertain what is actually known about the target words in question. This approach was combined with the framework of lexical competency proposed by Nation (1990) in an exploratory study which investigated the behaviour of lexical items on TOEFL. In individual interviews, six TOEFL vocabulary items were given to 30 pre-university international students who were then questioned about their knowledge of the target words’ associations, grammatical properties, collocations and various meaning senses. The results suggest that the type of item currently employed in TOEFL does not adequately reflect association, grammatical and collocational knowledge, and that even meaning knowledge is not captured as well as might be hoped. This indicates that the field could benefit from deeper exploration of what vocabulary test items are actually measuring.

[1]  Lewis W. Pike.  AN EVALUATION OF ALTERNATIVE ITEM FORMATS FOR TESTING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE , 1979 .

[2]  Norbert Schmitt,et al.  Measuring collocational knowledge : key issues and an experimental assessment procedure , 1998 .

[3]  J. Richards.  The Role of Vocabulary Teaching. , 1976 .

[4]  C. Clapham,et al.  Metalinguistic knowledge, language aptitude and language proficiency , 1997 .

[5]  Norbert Schmitt,et al.  Tracking the Incremental Acquisition of Second Language Vocabulary: A Longitudinal Study , 1998 .

[6]  Batia Laufer.  Reading in a foreign language: how does L2 lexical knowledge interact with the reader's general academic ability' , 1992 .

[7]  A STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF CONTEXTUALIZATION AND FAMILIARIZATION ON RESPONSES TO THE TOEFL VOCABULARY TEST ITEMS , 1991 .

[9]  Michael Stubbs,et al.  COLLOCATIONS AND SEMANTIC PROFILES: ON THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLE WITH QUANTITATIVE STUDIES , 1995 .

[10]  Norbert Schmitt,et al.  Quantifying word association responses: what is native-like? , 1998 .

[11]  Della Summers,et al.  Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture , 1993 .

[12]  M. Wesche,et al.  Assessing Second Language Vocabulary Knowledge: Depth Versus Breadth. , 1996 .

[13]  Thomas H. Huckin.  Second language reading and vocabulary learning , 1995 .

[14]  J. Read.  The development of a new measure of L2 vocabulary knowledge , 1993 .

[15]  Paul Meara,et al.  RESEARCHING VOCABULARY THROUGH A WORD KNOWLEDGE FRAMEWORK , 1997, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[16]  Sheila R. Brutten,et al.  An investigation of patterns of discontinuous learning: implications for ESL measurement , 1996 .

[17]  P. Nation,et al.  Vocabulary size and use: Lexical richness in L2 written production , 1995 .

[18]  B. Spolsky.  What does it mean to know howto use a language? An essay on the theoretical basis of language testing , 1985 .

[19]  C. Chapelle.  Are C-tests valid measures for L2 vocabulary research? , 1994 .

[20]  K. Perkins,et al.  A construct definition study of a standardized ESL vocabulary test , 1987 .

[21]  Descriptors Educational,et al.  of Educational Measurement , 1988 .

[22]  Lyle F. Bachman.  语言测试要略 = Fundamental considerations in language testing , 1990 .

[23]  D. Palermo.  Norms of Word Association. , 1971 .

[24]  P. Meara,et al.  An alternative to multiple choice vocabulary tests , 1987 .

[25]  Walter D. Way,et al.  AN INVESTIGATION OF PROPOSED REVISIONS TO SECTION 3 OF THE TOEFL TEST , 1994 .