An important gap in the field of second language vocabulary assessment concerns the lack of validated tests measuring aural vocabulary knowledge. The primary purpose of this study is to introduce and provide preliminary validity evidence for the Listening Vocabulary Levels Test (LVLT), which has been designed as a diagnostic tool to measure knowledge of the first five 1000-word frequency levels and the Academic Word List (AWL). Quantitative analyses based on the Rasch model utilized several aspects of Messick's validation framework. The findings indicated that (1) the items showed sufficient spread of difficulty, (2) the majority of the items displayed good fit to the Rasch model, (3) items and persons generally performed as predicted by a priori hypotheses, (4) the LVLT correlated with Parts 1 and 2 of the TOEIC listening test at .54, (5) the items displayed a high degree of unidimensionality, (6) the items showed a strong degree of measurement invariance with disattenuated Pearson correlations of .97 and .98 for person measures estimated with different sets of items, and (7) carelessness and guessing exerted only minor influences on test scores. Follow-up interviews and qualitative analyses indicated that the LVLT measures the intended construct of aural vocabulary knowledge, the format is easily understood, and the test has high face validity. This test fills an important gap in the field of second language vocabulary assessment by providing teachers and researchers with a way to assess aural vocabulary knowledge.

Vocabulary’s relationship to reading proficiency is frequently cited as a justification for the assessment of L2 written receptive vocabulary knowledge. However, to date, there has been relatively little research regarding which modalities of vocabulary knowledge have the strongest correlations to reading proficiency, and observed differences have often been statistically non-significant. The present research employs a bootstrapping approach to reach a clearer understanding of relationships between various modalities of vocabulary knowledge to reading proficiency. Test-takers ( N = 103) answered 1000 vocabulary test items spanning the third 1000 most frequent English words in the New General Service List corpus (Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013). Items were answered under four modalities: Yes/No checklists, form recall, meaning recall, and meaning recognition. These pools of test items were then sampled with replacement to create 1000 simulated tests ranging in length from five to 200 items and the results were correlated to the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC®) Reading scores. For all examined test lengths, meaning-recall vocabulary tests had the highest average correlations to reading proficiency, followed by form-recall vocabulary tests. The results indicated that tests of vocabulary recall are stronger predictors of reading proficiency than tests of vocabulary recognition, despite the theoretically closer relationship of vocabulary recognition to reading.

Two commonly used test types to assess vocabulary knowledge for the purpose of reading are size and levels tests. This article first reviews several frequently stated purposes of such tests (e.g., materials selection, tracking vocabulary growth) and provides a reasoned argument for the precision needed to serve such purposes. Then three sources of inaccuracy in existing tests are examined: the overestimation of lexical knowledge from guessing or use of test strategies under meaning-recognition item formats; the overestimation of vocabulary knowledge when receptive understanding of all word family members is assumed from a correct response to an item assessing knowledge of just one family member; and the limited precision that a small, random sample of target words has in representing the population of words from which it is drawn. The article concludes that existing tests lack the accuracy needed for many specified testing purposes and discusses possible improvements going forward.

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