Publications

Surprisingly little is known about the number and frequency level of words that beginner-to-low-intermediate 16-year-old learners of French, German, and Spanish are expected to know when taking high-stakes national exams in England. This study presents exploratory analyses of the lexical content of the listening and reading tests of these exams, a corpus totalling 116,645 running words. Specifically, it seeks to understand the number and frequency level of words that (a) this demographic seems to be expected to know and (b) could be needed for awarding organisations to create exams year-on-year. Key findings include that the proportion of low(er)-frequency words in the corpus of exam papers seemed large, given the stage of the learners and the purpose of the assessments. Critically, these low(er)-frequency words changed at a high rate between papers, likely incurring a heavy reliance on the lexical inferencing abilities of these relatively inexperienced language learners.

The awarding organizations that create and administer high-stakes assessments for beginner-to-low-intermediate 16-year-old learners of French, German, and Spanish in England provide optional topic-driven word lists as guides for teachers and textbook writers. Given that these lists are developed by the awarding organizations, they exert a powerful washback effect on teaching and learning. However, we do not know how much of these lists have actually been used in exams. We therefore analyzed the extent to which these lists have been used when developing the General Certificate of Secondary Education listening and reading exams, a corpus totaling 116,647 words. One key finding showed that approximately half of the awarding organizations’ lists had never been used in any of the exams to date. Given recent changes to curriculum policy, we also investigated how word list type—frequency-informed versus the awarding organizations’ topic-driven lists—affected lexical coverage of the exams. Overall, our findings suggested that using the topic-driven lists was likely to be a suboptimal use of lesson time, as they did not provide learners with enough words to understand any given text with ease. Frequency-informed word lists, however, seemed to better prepare learners for the exams.

The extent to which vocabulary competence consists of interrelated components of lexical knowledge has been widely discussed. Yet, few studies have explored the extent to which lexical knowledge and lexical processing are psychometrically distinct or their relative contribution to listening and reading, particularly among beginner-to-low-intermediate learners of languages other than English. The current study examines the extent to which lexical knowledge and processing are (a) psychometrically distinct and (b) predict listening and reading. 218 beginner-to-low intermediate adolescent learners of French completed a battery of tests, yielding measures of high-frequency lexical knowledge (meaning recognition and form recognition and recall), lexical processing (speed and automaticity of word recognition), and listening and reading proficiency. Results suggested that at this stage of proficiency, lexical knowledge and processing were psychometrically distinct. Lexical knowledge (but not processing) was found to strongly predict listening and reading. Findings underscore the importance of high-frequency vocabulary at these early stages.  

Research (e.g., Jeon & In’nami, 2022) has largely shown that second language (L2) proficiency is a multicomponential construct in so far as it encompasses many linguistic and non-linguistic variables, including knowledge (e.g., sound-spelling correspondences, vocabulary, and grammar), skills (e.g., listening, reading, writing, and speaking), and affective factors (e.g., motivation and attitudes towards language learning). This body of research has largely focused on (a) how one component (e.g., vocabulary knowledge) predicts another component (e.g., reading skills) and (b) highly-educated L2 learners of English in university settings. For instance, each of the four meta-analyses presented in Jeon and In’nami (2022) reported English as the most widely studied L2 by far. As such, very few studies have explored the interaction between or within individual components of language proficiency—be it linguistic or non-linguistic—with the same group of L2 learners, not least with learners of languages other than English, such as French or Spanish, in low-exposure, highly-instructed (‘foreign’ language) contexts. 

In England, this specific population of learners typically only receives 400-450 hours of exposure before sitting their high-stakes, national GCSE exams in the fifth year of secondary education, with very little—if any—exposure to the target language outside the classroom. These factors, together with the global dominance of English, are very likely to influence the nature of linguistic knowledge acquired and, in turn, the relations between proficiency and its linguistic and non-linguistic (affective) components. Likewise, our understanding of the state of linguistic knowledge among this population is extremely limited, with only a handful of available studies. It is thus difficult to know the extent to which findings from previous research on L2 English are generalisable within this educational context and similar low-exposure, highly-instructed, non-English contexts. 

Moreover, this lack of knowledge has consequently meant that the language education community in England—that is, teachers, teacher educators, textbook publishers, exam writers, curriculum designers, policy makers, and researchers—have had to operate with a very limited understanding of these learners’ proficiency when developing learning, teaching, and testing materials, resources, and tools. A case in point being the recent changes in the high-stakes General Certificate in Secondary Education (GCSE) exams taken by over 250,000 16-year-olds every year in England. 

Our book aims to address these gaps, by presenting findings from a comprehensive research study that investigated the (linguistic and non-linguistic) components of language proficiency among pre-intermediate 16-year-old learners of French and Spanish immediately after they completed their GCSE exams.