Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
6849477 System 2017 11 Pages PDF
Abstract
This study investigates the development of lexical sophistication as a result of residence/study abroad. Both knowledge and use of low-frequency vocabulary were analyzed before and at the end of a 9-month stay abroad. Data were collected from 27 English-speaking university learners of Spanish who spent an academic year in Spain or Mexico. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed twice using the Spanish version of the Swansea Levels 'X-lex' test (Meara & Milton, 2003) which tests recognition of words from different frequency bands. Vocabulary use was assessed based on oral and written data from a learner corpus collected at the same time points. A profiler for lexical sophistication was created based on Spanish frequency data from the Corpus del Español which calculates the ratio of low-frequency words to total words produced. Results demonstrate significant increases over time in both knowledge and use of low-frequency vocabulary. Findings are discussed in light of previous research on study abroad and the analysis of lexical sophistication.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Arts and Humanities Language and Linguistics
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