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<p>The main purpose of this paper was to construct and try out a test that could measure the size of both the receptive and productive vocabulary. This was a joint project, done by three students at the C-level in English in 1997. Before the test was constructed the students looked into previous investigations and different test methods used. The project group chose the Yes/No method as their test format. 23 students in their second year of their education at a theorectical programme in upper secondary school and 16 adult students at Komvux took the test in this paper. The results of the test taken by the students showed that it is impossible for a language teacher to construct a reliable and valid test for measuring vocabulary size using the Yes/No method.</p>

The main purpose of this paper was to construct and try out a test that could measure the size of both the receptive and productive vocabulary. This was a joint project, done by three students at the C-level in English in 1997. Before the test was constructed the students looked into previous investigations and different test methods used. The project group chose the Yes/No method as their test format. 23 students in their second year of their education at a theorectical programme in upper secondary school and 16 adult students at Komvux took the test in this paper. The results of the test taken by the students showed that it is impossible for a language teacher to construct a reliable and valid test for measuring vocabulary size using the Yes/No method.

The present study seeks to explore if the bilingual advantage and disadvantage of children who are natively bilingual in English and Spanish extends to children who gain exposure to and eventually become bilingual in these languages beginning at ages 5 and 6. Specifically, the study compares executive control, vocabulary, and verbal fluency for three groups of children: a) native Spanish-English bilinguals, b) late bilinguals that have completed at least 5 years of a 50-50 dual language immersion program in English and Spanish in school, and c) English monolinguals that have not had second language instruction. The proposed study seeks a better understanding of the unique cognitive skill sets of native and late bilingual and monolingual children, and to inform educational policy related to bilingual students. / text

First year students at university level encounter various challenges that might impact on their success or failure. At this level, learning is fairly dependent on extensive and intensive reading, thus the reader should have an adequate vocabulary size to assist with the reading comprehension process. Knowledge of vocabulary (or words) is deemed an essential factor in reading proficiency, mainly because meaning is derived from words and also because of the connection between words and comprehension of text. This study investigated the particular relationship among vocabulary size and vocabulary depth and reading comprehension of 105 first year B.Ed. students majoring in English at a university in the North West Province. Also, the vocabulary test results of two different groups, first and fourth years, were compared to determine if advancement of vocabulary levels occur over the study period of four years. A quantitative research approach was used in which the study population was required to complete standardised vocabulary size and vocabulary depth tests, reading comprehension tests and a survey questionnaire. The results were statistically computed to determine the relationship between vocabulary size and breadth and reading comprehension. The results showed a positive and significant effect size correlation between vocabulary size and depth, and reading comprehension. The participants in the study were mainly Afrikaans speaking students who received their school education in Afrikaans. The instruments used in the research were the Vocabulary Levels test (Nation, 1990), Read’s Word Associates Test (1992) and TOEFL reading comprehension tests. The questionnaire was added to determine previous exposure to English and current reading habits of the participants. A two-tailed Pearson product moment correlation and multiple regression analyses were run in order to determine which of the variables, vocabulary size or depth, makes a more significant contribution to reading comprehension and also to establish which variable was the most significant predictor of academic success in the June examination. Vocabulary size was identified as predictor for success in the June examination; furthermore, if gender is used as independent variable, different vocabulary size tests are identified for males and females. / MEd (Curriculum Development), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

First year students at university level encounter various challenges that might impact on their success or failure. At this level, learning is fairly dependent on extensive and intensive reading, thus the reader should have an adequate vocabulary size to assist with the reading comprehension process. Knowledge of vocabulary (or words) is deemed an essential factor in reading proficiency, mainly because meaning is derived from words and also because of the connection between words and comprehension of text. This study investigated the particular relationship among vocabulary size and vocabulary depth and reading comprehension of 105 first year B.Ed. students majoring in English at a university in the North West Province. Also, the vocabulary test results of two different groups, first and fourth years, were compared to determine if advancement of vocabulary levels occur over the study period of four years. A quantitative research approach was used in which the study population was required to complete standardised vocabulary size and vocabulary depth tests, reading comprehension tests and a survey questionnaire. The results were statistically computed to determine the relationship between vocabulary size and breadth and reading comprehension. The results showed a positive and significant effect size correlation between vocabulary size and depth, and reading comprehension. The participants in the study were mainly Afrikaans speaking students who received their school education in Afrikaans. The instruments used in the research were the Vocabulary Levels test (Nation, 1990), Read’s Word Associates Test (1992) and TOEFL reading comprehension tests. The questionnaire was added to determine previous exposure to English and current reading habits of the participants. A two-tailed Pearson product moment correlation and multiple regression analyses were run in order to determine which of the variables, vocabulary size or depth, makes a more significant contribution to reading comprehension and also to establish which variable was the most significant predictor of academic success in the June examination. Vocabulary size was identified as predictor for success in the June examination; furthermore, if gender is used as independent variable, different vocabulary size tests are identified for males and females. / MEd (Curriculum Development), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

For decades, vocabulary size tests have been built upon the idea that if a test-taker knows enough words at a given level of frequency based on a list from corpus, they will also know other words of that approximate frequency as well as all words that are more frequent. However, many vocabulary size tests are based on corpora that are as out-of-date as 70 years old and that may be ill-suited for these tests. Based on these potentially problematic areas, the following research questions were asked. First, to what degree would a vocabulary size test based on a large, contemporary corpus be reliable and valid? Second, would it be more reliable and valid than previously designed vocabulary size tests? Third, do words across, 1,000-word frequency bands vary in their item difficulty? In order to answer these research questions, 403 ESL learners took the Vocabulary of American English Size Test (VAST). This test was based on a words list generated from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). This thesis shows that COCA word list might be better suited for measuring vocabulary size than lists used in previous vocabulary size assessments. As a 450-million-word corpus, it far surpasses any corpus used in previously designed vocabulary size tests in terms of size, balance, and representativeness. The vocabulary size test built from the COCA list was both highly valid and highly reliable according to a Rasch-based analysis. Rasch person reliability and separation was calculated to be 0.96 and 4.62, respectively. However, the most significant finding of this thesis is that frequency ranking in a word list is actually not as good of a predictor of item difficulty in a vocabulary size assessment as perhaps researchers had previously assumed. A Pearson correlation between frequency ranking in the COCA list and item difficulty for 501 items taken from the first 5,000 most frequent words was 0.474 (r^2 = 0.225) meaning that frequency rank only accounted for 22.5% of the variability of item difficulty. The correlation decreased greatly when item difficulty was correlated against bands of 1,000 words to a weak r = 0.306, (r^2 = 0.094) meaning that 1,000-word bands of frequency only accounts for 9.4% of the variance. Because frequency is a not a highly accurate predictor of item difficulty, it is important to reconsider how vocabulary size tests are designed.

This study investigated the relationship between working memory and language in typically developing young children. The aim was to gain a better understanding of language development, in particular, the involvement of visual and verbal short-term memory in language acquisition and its influence on vocabulary size. It explored possible underlying causes of why some children have problems in the process of learning to talk, whereas other children acquire language easily. A total of 51 New Zealand English speaking children aged two to five completed a battery of assessments measuring receptive and expressive vocabulary and visual and verbal short-term memory. The standardized tests administered included the Receptive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Brownell, 2000b), the Expressive One Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Brownell, 2000a), the Visual Patterns Test (Stokes, Klee, Cruickshank, & Pleass, 2009), and the Test of Early Nonword Repetition (Stokes & Klee, 2009a). Receptive vocabulary knowledge was strongly associated with visual (r = .75) and verbal (r = .60) short-term memory performance and age (r = .72). The relationship of expressive vocabulary to visual short-term memory (r = .80) was stronger than to verbal short-term memory (r = .62) but significant for both and also for age (r= .83). Significant unique predictors for expressive vocabulary were age (R2 change = .60) as well as visual (R2 change = .04) and verbal (R2 change = .04) short-term memory. However, age appeared to be the only unique predictor for receptive vocabulary (R2 change = .54). In addition, the findings suggested that visual and verbal short-term memory increases as children get older. Hence, the Visual Patterns Test and Test of Early Nonword Repetition seem to be good predictors, over and above age, of expressive vocabulary knowledge.

The study examined the reliability of parents' reports of their child's verbal skills. Parents to 17 children participated and completed the toddler version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). It was found that the correlation between the reports made by the mothers and fathers was very strong. All in all the parents had a very similar understanding of their child's verbal skills. / Denna studie undersökte hur väl föräldrars rapport av deras barns språkförmåga stämmer överens. Föräldrarna till 17 barn deltog och fyllde i toddler-versionen av the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). Korrelationen mellan mammornas och pappornas rapportering var mycket stark. Överlag så hade föräldrarna en mycket liknande uppfattning av deras barns språkförmåga.

Reading approaches in Japan and other EFL settings have typically focused on accuracy at the expense of fluency. However, reading rate and fluency are important components of reading that are currently being neglected. A review of the literature reveals growing interest in investigating the effectiveness of reading rate and fluency enhancement approaches such as extensive reading (ER), speed reading, and oral fluency training. Results of previous research indicate the effectiveness of these approaches for increasing reading speed and fluency as well as comprehension, but the overall body of evidence in this area remains weak, particularly in EFL contexts.With these gaps in mind, the purposes of this study were to investigate the effectiveness of the ER approach in developing reading fluency, investigate appropriate ways to measure reading fluency in adult EFL readers, investigate whether reading fluency increases are accompanied by reading comprehension increases, and identify the patterns of reading rate development that occur during an ER course. To this end, a longitudinal quasi-experimental study was conducted with 77 first-year students at a nursing college in Japan, all of whom participated in one 15-week semester of ER with an added fluency training component (ERFT) and one 15-week semester of intensive reading (IR). Silent reading rate, oral reading rate and fluency, reading comprehension, and written receptive vocabulary size were measured at the beginning and end of both semesters. Silent reading rate, oral reading rate, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension were measured using both simplified and authentic texts. Approximately half of the students took ERFT in the first semester and IR in the second semester, and the other half did the opposite, so analyses were conducted separately for these two groups. Repeated-measures ANOVAs showed that for the IR-before-ERFT group, oral reading rate increase was significantly greater for the ERFT treatment (9.79 wcpm) than the IR treatment (3.05 wcpm) (p < .001) for simplified texts; silent reading rate increase was significantly greater for the IR treatment (8.26 wpm) than the ERFT treatment (-2.86 wpm) (p < .001) for authentic texts; and oral reading rate increase was significantly greater for ERFT (15.18 wcpm) than IR (4.37 wcpm) (p < .001) for authentic texts. For the ERFT-before-IR group, silent reading rate increase was significantly greater for ERFT (19.22 wpm) than IR (-2.50 wpm) (p < .001) for simplified texts; oral reading rate increase was significantly greater for ERFT (12.55 wcpm) than IR (4.81 wcpm) (p < .001) for simplified texts; silent reading rate increase was significantly greater for ERFT (21.86 wpm) than IR (-7.64 wpm) (p < .001) for authentic texts; and oral reading rate increase was significantly greater for IR (13.06 wcpm) than ERFT (6.70 wcpm) (p < .001) for authentic texts. Repeated-measures ANOVAs also showed that for the IR-before-ERFT group, reading comprehension increase for authentic texts was significantly greater for IR (1.00 logits) than ERFT (.17 logits) (p = .010); and vocabulary size increase was significantly greater for IR (.36 logits) than ERFT (-.19 logits) (p = .001). For the ERFT-before-IR group, reading comprehension increase for authentic texts was significantly greater for ERFT (1.05 logits) than IR (.11 logits) (p = .003); and vocabulary size increase was significantly greater for ERFT (.44 logits) than IR (-.07 logits) (p = .001). No significant correlations were found between changes in any of the reading rate and fluency measures (silent reading rate, oral reading rate, and oral reading fluency) and reading comprehension change. For the ERFT-before-IR group, analysis revealed a significant and moderately high negative correlation (r = -.422) between initial silent reading rate and silent reading rate change (on simplified texts) during the ERFT treatment. Analysis of individual students’ silent reading rate change patterns during the ERFT semester revealed a jagged increase to be the most common (22/77; 28.57%) pattern of rate increase. These results add to a growing body of evidence that ERFT yields greater reading fluency gains than IR, suggest that both ERFT and IR contribute to reading comprehension and vocabulary size gains, suggest that ERFT yields greater reading fluency gains among students with initially slower reading rates, and provide insight into how individual’s reading rate changes over the course of a semester of ERFT. / Teaching & Learning