The relationship between TOEFL vocabulary items and meaning, association, collocation and word-class knowledge
Norbert Schmitt University of Nottingham
In this paper the author argues that issues of construct validity should be given
more prominence in the validation of lexical test items. One way of determining
the construct validity of vocabulary items is to interview subjects directly after
taking the items to ascertain what is actually known about the target words in
question. This approach was combined with the framework of lexical competency
proposed by Nation (1990) in an exploratory study which investigated the behaviour
of lexical items on TOEFL. In individual interviews, six TOEFL vocabulary
items were given to 30 pre-university international students who were then questioned
about their knowledge of the target words’ associations, grammatical
properties, collocations and various meaning senses. The results suggest that the
type of item currently employed in TOEFL does not adequately reflect association,
grammatical and collocational knowledge, and that even meaning knowledge is
not captured as well as might be hoped. This indicates that the field could benefit
from deeper exploration of what vocabulary test items are actually measuring.
http://www.corpus4u.org/upload/forum/2005062303245794.pdf
Norbert Schmitt University of Nottingham
In this paper the author argues that issues of construct validity should be given
more prominence in the validation of lexical test items. One way of determining
the construct validity of vocabulary items is to interview subjects directly after
taking the items to ascertain what is actually known about the target words in
question. This approach was combined with the framework of lexical competency
proposed by Nation (1990) in an exploratory study which investigated the behaviour
of lexical items on TOEFL. In individual interviews, six TOEFL vocabulary
items were given to 30 pre-university international students who were then questioned
about their knowledge of the target words’ associations, grammatical
properties, collocations and various meaning senses. The results suggest that the
type of item currently employed in TOEFL does not adequately reflect association,
grammatical and collocational knowledge, and that even meaning knowledge is
not captured as well as might be hoped. This indicates that the field could benefit
from deeper exploration of what vocabulary test items are actually measuring.
http://www.corpus4u.org/upload/forum/2005062303245794.pdf
