Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge froal Vocabulary Acquisition
The studies reported in the previous section have used various instruments to measure the vocabulary knowledge of the participants. Table 5 provides a brief summary of the instruudies.
However, as argued by Read (2007), “there is in fact much more to know about words if they are to becoal units in the learner's L2 lexicon: how the word is pronounced and spelled, what its s are, how it functions syntactically, how frequent it is, how it is used appropriately froguistic perspective, and so on” (). Lexical acquisition is indeed a very coot be assumed that acquisition of a word's basic meaning will imply acquisition of other aspects of the word. This becotal vocabulary acquisition from listening, which differs from vocabulary acquisition through reading in that it may lead to knowledge of the pronunciation of words.
The instruments listed in Table 5 only tested the participants' vocabulary knowledge in one or two aspects. For example, both tests by Kazuya (2009) assessed the participants'knowledge of meaning, but not the spelling, pronunciation, or use of the target words. Therefore these instruly partially reveal the vocabulary gains that the learners made through listening.
To investigate the effects of listening on vocabulary acquisition, it is important to employ instrually test learners' vocabulary knowledge in such aspects as pronunciation of words.
Table 5 Instruments Used to Measure Vocabulary Knowledge
Aording to Nation (2001) as well as Webb (2009), all types of knowledge about a word can be divided into receptive and productive knowledge, which is illustrated in Table 6. It is clear that vocabulary assessment requires the use of o obtain a coure of the learners' vocabulary knowledge. Tests are needed to measure learners' receptive and productive knowledge in various aspects of vocabulary. Some instruments that are frequently used to assess vocabulary knowledge in terms of orthography, meaning, and gras are presented and illustrated in the following sections.
Table 6 Definitions of Receptive and Productive Knowledge
(Source: Webb, 2009, )
(a) ive Knowledge of Meaning
The Vocabulary Level Test developed by Nation (1990) is a way of testing receptive vocabulary knowledge of meaning. The format is very simple. Tests takers are given a list of six words in the left column and are required to select from them to match the three definitions in the right column. In a subsequent development, Read (2000) designed “o assess the learners' receptive knowledge by asking them to choose three target words fron and properly match their numbers with their synonyms or definitions in the right coluhe following example:
1. region
2. atlas 5 set of bones in the body
3. statue 1 part of a country
4. cell 4 smallest part of living things
5. skeleton
(Source: Read, 2000, )
(b) ive Knowledge of Orthographic Form
Webb (2005) developed a test to assess the receptive vocabulary knowledge of orthographic form (pronunciation and spelling). In the test, the learners were required to circle the correctly spelled target words, which appeared with three distracters. The distracters were created to resemble the target words both phoically and orthographically. See the following example:
(a) dengie (b) dengy (c) dungie (d) dangy
(a) hodet (b) holat (c) halet (d) hedet
(Source: Webb, 2005, )
(c) Measuring Productive Knowledge of Gras