Paul Nation Research Articles

A Preliminary Research to Develop A Customized Set of Vocabulary Size Test

This is a preliminary research to investigate useful words to function effectively in academic contexts, vocabulary size, the first-year students word list, and the steps to design the customized set of entry-level vocabulary size test. This research was a library research. To find out the ELESP students current vocabulary size, a vocabulary size test designed by Paul Nation was administered. The results show that useful words were (1) high-frequency words containing 2,000 word families, (2) academic words specified in the Academic Word List (Coxhead:2000), (3) technical words, (4) low-frequency words. The result of the administration of Nations Vocabulary Size Test shows that the students scores range between 33 and 96 words, with the mean score of 66. It means that the students vocabulary size ranges between 3,300 and 9,600 word families. The average students vocabulary size was 6,600 word families, which imply that most ELESP students are ready to read texts containing 88.7% word coverage. In order to increase their vocabulary size by 10,000 or more, they need to learn technical words and low-frequency words of a specialized subject area. Using Nations specifications for making the test, some procedures of test design are: Sampling the words for the items, Making the Stem, Writing the choices, The Order of the items in the Test, Piloting, Administering the Test. The decisions on curriculum, materials and teaching strategies should be based on the results of vocabulary size to gain optimum learning outcome.

Calibrating English Language Courses with Major International and National EFL Tests via Vocabulary Range

With the purpose of describing levels of English language proficiency expected at each stage in our school’s Diploma and BA programs, we attempted to compare the level of courses with national standards as embodied in the national TEM4 and TEM8, and with international standards as embodied in international examinations such as Cambridge ESOL, and other descriptions such as the Common European Framework via one quantifiable parameter: vocabulary range. This is justified as vocabulary range offers an approximate but useful guide to the level of a course or a testing system. We hypothesize that the language competence at different levels of our program matches various standard proficiency examinations. Paul Nation’s Range software was used both in its standard form using his three BASEWRD files and in an adapted form adding the authors’ own BASEWRD files extrapolated from various levels of our textbook series. This enabled us to compare the vocabulary range of our courses with that of both national and international examinations where word lists are available or recoverable. Research results supported the hypotheses suggested.

An experimental study on the vocabulary level and vocabulary consolidation strategies

The purpose of the research is to determine the effects of “Vocabulary Consolidation Strategy Training” on vocabulary learning, and the use of Vocabulary Consolidation strategies. The population of this study was the 34 students (12 female, 22 male) from a, university preparatory class in the Spring Term of the 2009-2010 Academic Year. The research presented in this study was based, on a randomized pretest posttest control group design., In this research, “Vocabulary Level Test” based on Paul Nation's Vocabulary Levels Tests (Nation, 1990) and “Vocabulary, Consolidation Strategy Inventory” adapted from Fan (2003); Schmitt (1997); Gu and Johnson (1996) were used. In the analysis, of the data, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, percentage, and t-Test techniques were used, and KR 20 reliability test was, administered for the Vocabulary Consolidation Strategy Scale. The significance level of the tests was .05.As a result of the research, there were statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups in favor of, the experimental group at the vocabulary levels 1000B, and 2000, but there was not any statistically significant difference between the groups at vocabulary level 1000A.

An interview with John Read

How do we measure a student’s vocabulary? John Read of Auckland University, New Zealand, is the person best qualified to answer this question. Along with Paul Nation and Paul Meara, he has spent the last 30 years researching vocabulary knowledge, acquisition and assessment. In this interview he explains how he came to be interested in vocabulary assessment, and how he wrote his two well-known works: the word-associates test and the book Assessing Vocabulary.

Paul Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity and the Politics of Land 1880–1914, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2008. £50. 978 0 86193 297 9.

Paul Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity and the Politics of Land 1880–1914, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2008. £50. 978 0 86193 297 9.

Book Reviews

Reviews of: 'Focus on Vocabulary,' by Paul Nation and Peter Yongqi Gu; 'Research in Applied Linguistics: Becoming a Discerning Consumer,' by Fred L. Perry, Jr.; and 'The Psychology of the Language Learner: Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition,' by Zoltan Dornyei.

FOCUS ON VOCABULARY. Paul Nation and Peter Yongqi Gu. Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarie University, 2007. Pp. iv + 177. £13.95 paper.

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Editorial: Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition / Éditorial : Acquisition du vocabulaire d'une langue seconde

Editorial/Éditorial : Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition/Acquisition du vocabulaire d'une langue seconde Marlise Horst Tom Cobb In the call for papers for this special issue on second language (L2) vocabulary research, we suggested several possible themes for submissions, including formulaic sequences and corpus-based approaches. We are pleased to report that high-quality submissions on these topics arrived – from researchers in Canada and as far away as New Zealand – and that we also received excellent papers on many other subjects. The result is a special issue that addresses a range of topics. The embarras de richesse makes it difficult to organize the issue into neat thematic sections, but it clearly bodes well for the future of an area that was once considered neglected (Meara, 1980). What is in this issue? The issue begins with two pieces on formulaic sequences, both with a focus on speech. In the first of these, David Wood looks closely at the sequences that learners of English use in narrative retell tasks, which are not always accurate but appear to become more so over time. He identifies five key functions of formulaic sequences and demonstrates how they contribute to fluent speech. Fluent performance in real time is also the theme in Tess Fitzpatrick and Alison Wray's investigation. In this highly original study, the researchers helped learners prepare formulaic utterances for specific conversations they were planning to have and examined their ability to employ them accurately in practice and real conversations in relation to individual variables such as proficiency and aptitude. In the category of corpus-based research is Paul Nation's study of 14 new frequency lists from the recently completed British National Corpus (BNC) of 100 million words of mainly written, but also spoken, English. Corpus-based frequency lists are of great pedagogical importance, and their impact on the L2 vocabulary research of recent years can hardly be overstated. In addition to identifying the vocabulary that learners of [End Page 1] English would do well to study at various stages of their development, frequency lists have also made useful new research instruments possible. One example is the set of tools now available for assessing learners' vocabulary size, such as the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1990; Schmitt, 2000) and the Eurocentres Vocabulary Size Test (Meara & Buxton, 1987); both of these widely used instruments rely on the principle of sampling words from frequency bands. Another example is lexical frequency profiling (Laufer & Nation, 1995), a technique for analyzing texts in terms of the proportions accounted for by frequent and less frequent words. Until now, however, profiling software has been able to make only four rather rough frequency distinctions: Words in submitted texts were either on West's (1953) lists of the 1,000 and 2,000 most frequent words, on Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word list, or 'off-list' (on none of the three previous lists). By contrast, the new BNC lists (and the online profiler based on them, available at www.lextutor.ca/vp/bnc/.) allows for words in a submitted text to be categorized at 16 different levels of frequency. In his study in this issue, Nation tests the new lists against various corpora and determines more definitively than was previously possible the vocabulary sizes that learners of English need for unassisted comprehension of both spoken and written text. Testifying to the value of frequency profiling as a tool for research are studies by Marlise Horst and Laura Collins and by Valentin Ovtcharov, Tom Cobb, and Randall Halter. Horst and Collins used the standard four-level scheme to examine the longitudinal development of lexical richness in a series of learner corpora consisting of narratives written by young francophone learners of English. The unexpected finding of little change inspired the authors to reexamine the data using finer measures including a Greco-Latin cognate index and a types-per...

RECEPTIVE AND PRODUCTIVE VOCABULARY LEARNING: The Effects of Reading and Writing on Word Knowledge

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge—orthography, syntax, association, grammatical functions, and meaning and form—were each measured by receptive and productive tests. The study uses an innovative methodology in that each target word was tested in 10 different ways. The first experiment showed that, when the same amount of time was spent on both tasks, the reading task was superior. The second experiment showed that, when the allotted time on tasks depends on the amount of time needed for completion, with the writing task requiring more time, the writing task was more effective. If the second experiment represents authentic learning, then a stronger argument can be made to use productive vocabulary learning tasks over receptive tasks.I wish to acknowledge the generous input of the following people in the evolution of this paper: Paul Nation, Jonathan Newton, and Jim Dickie from Victoria University of Wellington, and the anonymous SSLA reviewers, for their helpful comments.

VOCABULARY IN LANGUAGE TEACHING. Norbert Schmitt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 224. $59.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

It has been more than a decade since the publication of Paul Nation's Teaching and learning vocabulary (1990), which brought together the findings in lexical acquisition and teaching at the time and has been an invaluable reference and guide to many in the field. However, after years of neglect, vocabulary acquisition has finally come into its own with an explosion of attention and new research, creating a need for an update. Just in time comes Norbert Schmitt's Vocabulary in language teaching (VLT) in the Cambridge Language Education Series.

How Big Is the Gap and How To Narrow It? an Investigation Into the Active and Passive Vocabulary Knowledge of L2 Learners

It is generally believed that L2 learners know more words of the target language than they can actually use them. The aim of this study is to find out more about this gap and the ways to narrow it. The subjects under study were several groups of sub-degree students and the instruments for data collection included an active and a passive vocabulary test as well as a questionnaire. There was no evidence to indicate a consistent ratio between active and passive vocabulary knowledge and the relationship between them has been found to be more complicated than it appears to be. On the other hand, learning strategies which help to enhance active vocabulary knowledge have been identified. These and other findings of the study will be of interest to researchers in similar areas as well EAP teachers who are concerned about improving the vocabulary knowledge of their students. The author is indebted to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for funding the project and Professor Paul Nation for providing the long version of the Word Levels Test used in the study.

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access CHRISTOPHER S. BUTLER (ed.): Computers and Written Texts. Blackwell, 1992. Paul Nation Paul Nation Victoria University of Wellington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, Volume 15, Issue 2, June 1994, Pages 232–233, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/15.2.232 Published: 01 June 1994 Article history Received: 01 April 1993 Published: 01 June 1994