Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 154

Once the lexical units that are the focus of the assessment have been defined, the next step is to select a sample of those units, and the basis for that selection depends on the context. For example, in the classroom situation, the vocabulary that the learners need to know is commonly specified in the coursebook, the syllabus, or other components of the language curriculum. For more general purposes, word‐frequency lists are used as a key reference, on the principle that higher‐frequency words are more useful to, and more likely to be known by, learners than words which do not commonly occur in the language. The classic source of word‐frequency information for ESL vocabulary tests has been West's (1953) General Service List.

With advances in computer corpus analysis, there are now multiple lists of written vocabulary, including two new general service lists (Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013; Brezina & Gablasova, 2015), two lists of high‐frequency words in academic texts (Coxhead, 2000; Gardner & Davies, 2014), and two of academic collocations (Simpson‐Vlach & Ellis, 2010; Ackermann & Chen, 2013). Corpus software can not only count the occurrence of words but also help to identify vocabulary that is distinctive to particular disciplines, genres, or types of text. Although spoken vocabulary is still greatly underrepresented in corpora, an academic spoken word list (Dang, Coxhead, & Webb, 2017) has recently appeared.

It should be pointed out, though, that not all vocabulary measures involve preselecting of the lexical items to be assessed. With measures of comprehension and use of vocabulary, described later in this entry, it is texts or tasks that are selected rather than words.