Abstract
Measuring lexical sophistication in two types of L2 English learner corpora
Vocabulary lists of high-frequency lexical items are an important resource in language education (Youngblood & Folse, 2017) and one of the most important products of corpus research (Miller & Biber, 2015), used by language learners, teachers, material designers, assessment specialists, and data scientists. However, ‘usefulness is not an inherent trait transferable from context to context’ (Schmitt, 2016: 17), and the appropriateness of such lists is affected by the corpora on which they are based. This paper investigates the impact of corpus selection on measures of lexical sophistication, focusing on two frequency lists derived from a program-specific learner corpus (Pittsburgh English Language Institute Corpus) and a non-program-specific learner corpus (Cambridge Learner Corpus). The results indicate that frequency lists derived from both types of learner corpus can effectively serve as the basis for measuring learners’ lexical sophistication, regardless of the specific program of the learners, and as such, publicly-available learner corpora frequency lists can be a reliable resource for stakeholders interested in the lexical gains of language learners.
Location and Address
Cathedral of Learning, 332