Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T05:55:19.647Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A developmental perspective on productive lexical knowledge in L2 oral interlanguage1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

ANNABELLE DAVID
ANNABELLE DAVID*
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
*
Address for correspondence: Annabelle David, School of Modern Languages, Old Library Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK e-mail: annabelle.david@ncl.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article reports on productive vocabulary development by instructed British learners of French over a five-year period (from age 13 to 18). Lexical diversity development was investigated through a semi-guided oral picture-based task. Results show that the students' lexical diversity (as measured by D) did significantly improve throughout the five years showing little sign of slower periods. Overall more noun types were observed than verb types in the composition of the lexicon throughout the study but with a consistent decrease in its proportion after Year 10. Further results using the Limiting Relative Diversity measure indicate that learners vary their use of nouns to a much larger extent than verbs. The discussion focuses on the noun-bias hypothesis and the use of different elicitation tasks.

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. 315 - 331
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

The research reported here is based on data collected during the FLLOC project (directed by Florence Myles and Ros Mitchell) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) award numbers R000223421, RES000220070, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) RE-AN9057/APN-15456, AR112118 and the British Academy SG 41141 since 2001, at the University of Southampton and Newcastle University. Special thanks go to all of the participants and native speakers for their help with data collection and transcription. The author would like to thank: Sarah Rule for her help with checking the lemmatisation of the data, Florence Myles, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this paper.

References

REFERENCES

Bassano, D. (2000). Early development of nouns and verbs in French: exploring the interface between lexicon and grammar. Journal of Child Language, 27: 521–559.Google Scholar
Brown, A. (2003). Interviewer variation and the co-construction of speaking proficiency. Language Testing, 20.1: 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caselli, C., Casadio, P. and Bates, E. (1999). A comparison of the transition from first words to grammar in English and Italian. Journal of Child Language, 26: 69–111.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Childers, J. B. and Tomasello, M. (2006). Are nouns easier to learn than verbs? Three experimental studies. In: Hirsh-Pasek, K. and Golinkoff, R. (eds.), Action Meets Word: How Children Learn Verbs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clark, E. (1993). The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collentine, J. (2004). The effects of learning contexts on morphosyntactic and lexical development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26.2: 227–248.Google Scholar
Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.). (2007). Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daller, H. and Xue, H. (2007). Lexical richness and the oral proficiency of Chinese EFL students. In: Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.), pp. 150–164.Google Scholar
David, A. (2004). The developing bilingual lexicon. Unpublished PhD thesis, Newcastle University.Google Scholar
David, A. (2007). Do story (re-)telling tasks really tell us something about lexical development? Paper presented at the Models and Concepts: practical needs and theoretical approaches in modelling and measuring vocabulary knowledge (ESRC seminar series), Swansea, UK, 6–7 July 2007.Google Scholar
Eyckmans, J., van de Velde, H., van Hout, R. and Boers, F. (2007). Learners' response behaviour in yes/no vocabulary tests. In: Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.), pp. 116–132.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, T. (2007). Productive vocabulary tests and the search for concurrent validity. In Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.), pp. 116–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gass, S. (1999). Discussion. Incidental vocabulary learning.Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21: 319–333.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In Kuczaj, S. A., II (ed.), Language Development: Vol. 2. Language, Thought, and Culture. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 301–334.Google Scholar
Guiraud, P. (1954). Les Caractéristiques statistiques du vocabulaire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Hall, J., Paus, C. and Smith, J. (1993). Metacognitive and other knowledge about the mental lexicon: do we know how many words we know? Applied Linguistics, 14.2:189–206.Google Scholar
Kauschke, C. and Hofmeister, C. (2002). Early lexical development in German: a study on vocabulary growth and vocabulary composition during the second and third year of life. Journal of Child Language, 29: 735–757.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kern, S. (2007). Lexicon development in French-speaking infants. First Language, 27.3: 227–250.Google Scholar
Kroll, J. and Tokowicz, N. (2001). The development of conceptual representation for words in a second language. In Nicol, J. (ed.), One Mind Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 49–71.Google Scholar
Laufer, B. and Paribakht, T. S. (1998). The relationship between passive and active vocabularies: effects of language learning contexts. Language Learning, 48.3: 365–391.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd edn, vol. 2. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Malvern, D., Richards, B., Chipere, N. and Durán, P. (2004). Lexical Diversity and Language Development: Quantification and Assessment. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, P. and Jarvis, S. (2007). Vocd: a theoretical and empirical evaluation. Language Testing, 24.4: 459–488.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKee, G., Malvern, D. and Richards, B. (2000). Measuring vocabulary diversity using dedicated software. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 15.3: 323–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meara, P. and Milton, J. (2003). X_Lex The Swansea Levels Test. Newbury: Express.Google Scholar
Milton, J. (2006). Language lite? Learning French vocabulary in school. Journal of French Language Studies, 16.2, 187–205.Google Scholar
Milton, J. and Meara, P. (1998). Are the British really bad at learning foreign languages? Language Learning Journal, 18: 68–76.Google Scholar
Myles, F. (1995). Interaction between linguistic theory and language processing in SLA. Second Language Research, 11.3: 235–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myles, F. (2003). The early development of L2 narratives: a longitudinal study. Marges Linguistiques, 5: 40–55.Google Scholar
Myles, F. (2004). From data to theory: the over-representation of linguistic knowledge in Towell, SLA. In R. and Hawkins, R. (eds.), Empirical evidence and theories of representation in current research in Second Language Acquisition: Special Issue of Transactions of the Philological Society, pp. 139–168.Google Scholar
Myles, F. (2005). Interlanguage corpora and second language acquisition research. Second Language Research, 21.4: 373–391.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Myles, F. (2007). Using electronic corpora in SLA research. In: Ayoun, D. (ed.), Handbook of French Applied Linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 377–400.Google Scholar
Myles, F. and Mitchell, R. (2004). Using information technology to support empirical SLA research. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1.2: 169–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nation, I. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nation, P. (2007). Fundamental issues in modelling and assessing vocabulary knowledge. In: Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.), pp. 33–43.Google Scholar
Read, J. (2000). Assessing Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, B. and Malvern, D. (2007). Validity and threats to the validity of vocabulary measurement. In Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds.), pp. 79–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rule, S. (2004). French interlanguage oral corpora: recent developments. Journal of French Language Studies, 14: 343–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rule, S., Marsden, E., Myles, F. and Mitchell, R. (2003). Constructing a database of French interlanguage oral corpora. In: Archer, D., Rayson, R., Wilson, E. and McEnery, T. (eds.), Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 Conference, Vol. 16. University of Lancaster: UCREL Technical Papers, pp. 669–677.Google Scholar
Tardif, T., Shatz, M. and Naigles, L. (1997). Caregiver speech and children's use of nouns versus verbs: a comparison of English, Italian and Mandarin. Journal of Child Language, 24: 535–565.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tidball, F. and Treffers-Daller, J. (2007). Exploring measures of vocabulary richness in semi-spontaneous French speech. In Daller, H., Milton, J. and Treffers-Daller, J. (eds), pp. 133–149.Google Scholar
Verhallen, M. and Schoonen, R. (1998). Lexical knowledge in L1 and L2 of third and fifth graders. Applied Linguistics, 19.4: 452–470.Google Scholar
Vermeer, A. (2004). The relation between lexical richness and vocabulary size in Dutch L1 and L2 children. In: Bogaards, P. and Laufer, B. (eds.), Vocabulary in a Second Language. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 173–189.Google Scholar
Waring, R. (1997) A comparison of the receptive and productive vocabulary sizes of some second language learners. Immaculata: The Occasional Papers at Notre Dame Seishin University, 94–114.Google Scholar