News

ISSN Number

2632-6779 (Print)  

2633-6898 (Online)

Abstracting/Indexing/Listing

Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (ProQuest)

MLA International Bibliography

MLA Directory of Periodicals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

QOAM (Quality Open Access Market)

British National Bibliography

WAC Clearinghouse Journal Listings

EBSCO Education

ICI Journals Master List

ERIH PLUS

CNKI Scholar

Gale-Cengage

WorldCat

Crossref

Baidu Scholar

British Library

J-Gate

ROAD

BASE

Publons

Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

ORE Directory

TIRF

China National Center for Philosophy and Social Sciences Documentation

 

Home Journal Index 2023-2

Exploring the Productive Vocabulary of EFL Learners Through Lexical Availability

Download Full PDF

Rosa Mª Jiménez-Catalán

University of La Rioja, Spain

 

Abstract

This study has two objectives. The first is to ascertain whether there exists a relationship between the level of productive vocabulary and lexical availability in English as a foreign language. The second is to explore the depth of productive lexical knowledge through qualitative analysis of the level of words generated by upper secondary EFL learners. The measurement instruments were a Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) and a lexical availability task, with eight semantic categories that served as prompts to activate word production. In the present study we analysed two traditional (SCHOOL, ANIMALS) and two non-traditional (TRAIN, FREE) semantic categories. We aimed to determine whether lexical availability and productive vocabulary are two closely related dimensions. The results show a significant positive correlation between the production of words generated in the lexical availability task and the scores obtained in PVLT. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis of the data indicates that the words generated by two groups of EFL learners correspond predominantly to the level of the 1,000 and 2,000 most frequent words in English.

 

Keywords

Lexical availability, productive vocabulary level, PVLT, EFL learners, word level