Development of lexical richness among beginning learners of French as a foreign language

Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge forms the basis of all the communicative skills and is a core component of language proficiency. In educational contexts in which target language input is limited, the acquisition of new vocabulary can be a challenging task for learners, and lexical development might be slow. This study explored the extent to which 14 upper-secondary students of French as a foreign language (FFL) in Norwegian schools showed signs of increased lexical richness in their written production over a period of approximately six months. The data were taken from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) corpus, a digital collection of second and foreign-language learner texts. Two aspects of lexical richness were investigated: 1) lexical sophistication was measured using the MultiLingProfiler software for lexical frequency profiling and supplemented by a manual and more detailed analysis of five learners’ texts; 2) lexical diversity was measured using D_Tools v.2.0 and word family counts. The data revealed that although many learners showed signs of using a somewhat more varied vocabulary over time, it is difficult to find proof of productive vocabulary development among beginning learners of FFL within such a limited period. The study suggests that finer-grained measures of analysis could be added to existing automated tools to make these tools more useful for beginner levels.

The development of sentence complexity in the writing of young learners of L3 Spanish in Norway

“…Then an analysis of these descriptors was applied to texts written by a class of young learners of L3 Spanish in Norway. The findings support the need to develop more fine-grained measures for young and novice language learners, which also is discussed inVold (2022) in relation to vocabulary development among learners of L3 French in Norway.…”

Introducing Multilingprofiler: An Adaptable Tool for Analysing the Vocabulary in French, German, and Spanish Texts

“…An example of type (iii) research is (Mitchell & Myles, 2023) study of the frequency of vocabulary used in teacher input in a French primary classroom. We are aware of one use of Multi-lingProfiler in type (i) research (albeit to look at production rather than comprehension) on the development of the lexical richness of texts written by beginner learners of French (Vold, 2022), which is encouraging as we have seen that studies of this type with learners of French, German, and Spanish are few. We believe that MultilingProfiler can play a role in facilitating this much needed research in the future by enabling researchers to easily create experimental texts with different vocabulary levels.…”