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.