What is the relationship between the lexical profile of test items and performance on a standardized English proficiency test?

•Large variation between the lexical profiles of passages in CanTEST.•On average the reading passages exceeded the lexical demands of most written text.•On average the listening passages exceeded the lexical demands of most spoken text.•Little relationship between the lexical profiles of the passages and test scores.

Lexical profiling research has indicated the vocabulary sizes that may be necessary to comprehend different spoken and written text types. These figures are based on studies of lexical coverage that have indicated that comprehension is likely to rise as the number of known words in a text increases (e.g., Laufer, 1989). This study examined the lexical profiles of passages included in an English L2 proficiency test used for university admission purposes. A total of 87 reading comprehension, listening comprehension, and cloze passages from CanTEST were analyzed to determine the vocabulary size needed to reach 95% and 98% lexical coverage. The results indicated that there was large variation between the lexical profiles of the texts. At the 1000 word frequency level, there were differences ranging from 15.22% to 20.05% coverage between the most and least lexical demanding passages in the three parts of the test. The correlations between the lexical profiles of the texts at the different word frequency levels and performance on the corresponding test items were calculated to determine the relationship between these two variables. The results indicated that there was either no correlation or a small correlation in all comparisons.