Measuring Productive Vocabulary Depth: Current Practices and New Perspectives

Tebaa, Wassila; Boukhedimi, Yasmine

مجلة البحوث التربوية والتعليمية
Volume 13, Numéro 1, Pages 969-986
2024-03-31

Measuring Productive Vocabulary Depth: Current Practices And New Perspectives

Authors : Tebaa Wassila . Boukhedimi Yasmine .

Abstract

Second and foreign language depth of vocabulary knowledge is a challenging issue where no consensus has yet been reached amongst researchers as concerns its conception. The multidimensionality nature of word depth meaning made it difficult to design accurate measures in assessing vocabulary. This article reviews the incremental definitions of deep lexical knowledge and its existing measures. It is concludes that previous studies focused on the assessment of some aspects of depth (e.g. collocations, synonyms, associations and using words at sentence level context), but they mostly neglected the entire language communicative contexts. These insights are important for language assessors who should consider more contextualized measures of vocabulary use; especially that language learning is communicatively oriented.