Investigation of Vocabulary in a Corpus of Written Production of Greek Learners of English

Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Teaching, Learning and Education

Year: 2021

DOI:

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Investigation of Vocabulary in a Corpus of Written Production of Greek Learners of English

Chrysanthi Tiliakou, Katerina T. Frantzi

ABSTRACT: 

This work focuses on the exploration of a learner corpus for the identification of the amount and level of vocabulary used in the writing production of learners and the exploration of the extent the vocabulary assigns these samples to the expected level of proficiency. The objective is to record the vocabulary appearing and to categorize it according to the Common European Framework levels. The corpus consists of 69 pieces of writing by 12 and 13-year-old learners of English in Greece, produced in the writing module of the KPG Exam, an exam battery for learners of Foreign Languages in Greece, for levels A1-A2. As a corpus-assisted study, key-word analysis is applied, identifying lexical items that do not present the same relevant frequency compared to the reference corpus. Since lexical criteria may account for L2 development, the analysis of the texts focuses on the lexical aspects of English and is performed using the English Vocabulary Profile Online tool (Cambridge University Press, 2015). The results showed that the larger part of content words and especially nouns, verbs, and noun- verb combinations used belonged to A1 level while a smaller amount was of A2 and a few words of B1 and B2 levels. The occurrence of the higher-level words correlated with the higher graded writings and the respective learners’ higher proficiency.

keywords: learner corpus, writing module, vocabulary, language levels.