Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:35:38.641Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Analysing lexical richness in French learner language: what frequency lists and teacher judgements can tell us about basic and advanced words1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

FRANÇOISE TIDBALL  and
JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER
FRANÇOISE TIDBALL*
Affiliation:
University of the West of England, Bristol
JEANINE TREFFERS-DALLER*
Affiliation:
University of the West of England, Bristol
*
Address for correspondence: Françoise Tidball, Department of Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY e-mail: [email protected]
Address for correspondence: Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Department of Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper we study different aspects of lexical richness in narratives of British learners of French. In particular we focus on different ways of measuring lexical sophistication. We compare the power of three different operationalisations of the Advanced Guiraud (AG) (Daller, van Hout and Treffers-Daller, 2003): one based on teacher judgement, one on ‘le français fondamental 1er degré’ and one on frequency of lexical items. The results show that teacher judgement is a highly reliable tool for assessing lexical sophistication. The AG based on teacher judgements is better able to discriminate between the groups than the other operationalisations. It also works better than Vocabprofil (the French version of Laufer and Nation's (1995) Lexical Frequency Profile).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 18 , Special Issue 3: Knowledge and use of the lexicon in French as a second language , November 2008 , pp. 299 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

We would like to thank Kate Beeching, Jean-Yves Cousquer, Annie Lewis, Gareth Lewis and John Tidball for their help in collecting and/or transcribing the data, the tutors who provided the judgements on the vocabulary items, Brian Richards for his guidance on the reliability analyses of the data and his detailed comments and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

References

REFERENCES

Cobb, T. and Horst, M. (2001). Is there an academic word list in French? In: Bogaards, P. and Laufer, B. (eds.), Vocabulary in a Second Language. Benjamins, pp. 15–38.Google Scholar
Daller, H. and Huijuan, Xue (2007). Lexical richness and the oral proficiency of Chinese EFL students. In: Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.), Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daller, H., Van Hout, R. and Treffers-Daller, J. (2003). Lexical richness in spontaneous speech of bilinguals. Applied Linguistics 24: 197–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodfellow, R., Jones, G. and Lamy, M.-N. (2002). Assessing learners' writing using Lexical Frequency Profile. ReCALL 14: 129–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gougenheim, G. (1959). Le Français fondamental 1er degré. Ministère de l'Education Nationale. Paris: Institut National de Recherche et de Documentation Pédagogiques.Google Scholar
Gougenheim, G., Rivenc, P., Michéa, R. et Sauvageot, A. (1964). L’élaboration du français fondamental. Paris: Didier.Google Scholar
Guiraud, P. (1954). Les caractéristiques du vocabulaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Hayes, D. P. and Ahrens, M. G. (1988). Vocabulary simplification for children: a special case of ‘motherese’. Journal of Child Language 15: 395–410.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Horst, M. and Collins, L. (2006). From Faible to strong: how does their vocabulary grow? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 63 (1): 83–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
INALF (1971). Dictionnaire des fréquences du Trésor de la Langue Française. Paris: Didier.Google Scholar
Jarvis, S. (2002). Short texts, best-fitting curves and new measures of lexical diversity. Language Testing, 19: 57–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laufer, B. (1995). Beyond 2000. A measure of productive lexicon in a second language. In: Eubank, L., Selinker, L. and Smith, M. Sharwood (eds.). The Current State of Interlanguage. Studies in Honor of William E. Rutherford. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 265–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laufer, B. (1998). The development of active and passive vocabulary in a second language: same or different? Applied Linguistics 16: 307–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laufer, B. and Nation, P. (1995). Vocabulary size & use: Lexical richness in L2 written productions. Applied Linguistics 16 (3), 307–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laufer, B. and Paribakht, T. S. (1998). The relationship between active and passive vocabularies: effects of language learning context. Language Learning 48 (3), 365–391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Malvern, D. D., Richards, B. J., Chipere, N. and Durán, P. (2004). Lexical Diversity and Language Development: Quantification and Assessment. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, and Jarvis, (2007). VOCD a theoretical and empirical investigation. Language Testing, 24 (4): 459–488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meara, P. and Bell, H. (2001). P_Lex: a simple and effective way of describing the lexical characteristics of short L2 texts. Prospect 16: 5–19.Google Scholar
Ovtcharov, V., Cobb, T. and Halter, R. (2006). La richesse lexicale des productions orales: mesure fiable du niveau de compétence langagière. The Canadian Modern Language ReviewLa revue canadienne des langues vivantes. 63 (1): 107–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Picoche, J. (1993). Didactique du vocabulaire. Paris: Nathan.Google Scholar
Plauen, E. O. [1952] 1996. Vater und Sohn, Band 2. Ravensburger Taschenbuch.Google Scholar
Read, J. (2000). Assessing Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tidball, F. and Treffers-Daller, J. (2007). Exploring measures of vocabulary richness in semi-spontaneous French speech: A quest for the Holy Grail? In: Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.) (2007). Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 133–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tidball, F. and Treffers-Daller, J. (In preparation). Variability in the expression of motion events by British learners of French: the role of transfer and simplification.Google Scholar
Van Hell, J. G. and de Groot, A. M. B. (1998). Conceptual representation in bilingual memory: Effects of concreteness and cognate status in word association. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1 (3), 193–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verlinde, S. and Selva, T. (2001). Corpus-based versus intuition-based lexicography: Defining a word list for a French learner's dictionary. In: Rayson, P., Wilson, A., McEnery, T., Hardie, A. and Khoja, S. (eds.). Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2001 Conference. Lancaster: LancasterUniversity, University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, pp. 594–598.Google Scholar
Vermeer, A. (2000). Coming to grips with lexical richness in spontaneous speech data. Language Testing 17, 65–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Véronis, J. (2000). Fréquence des mots en français parlé. http://www.up.univ-mrs.fr/~ veronis [accessed 1 October 2007]Google Scholar

WEBSITES

The Range programme (Paul Nation): http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspxGoogle Scholar
Vocabprofil: http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/fr/Google Scholar
Beeching's corpus of spoken French: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/hlss/llas/iclru/corpus.pdfGoogle Scholar
DELIC team (Description Linguistique Informatisée sur Corpus): http://sites.univ-provence.fr/delic/Google Scholar
Véronis' frequency lists: http://sites.univ-provence.fr/veronis/donnees/index.htmlGoogle Scholar