Tools for Researching Vocabulary

Receptive vocabulary size and its relationship to EFL language skills

“…X_Lex (Meara 2005) and Y_Lex (Meara and Miralpeix 2006) are computer tests that assess receptive vocabulary size, i. e., the amount of words a person knows in English. They do so by presenting a set of words, one at a time, in a context-free environment.…”

Effects of task complexity on the oral production of Chinese learners of Portuguese as a foreign language

“…In the present study the input was mainly visual, to avoid ambiguity in the interpretation of the results; nevertheless, of the two lexical diversity measures used, that is, Guiraud's Index and VOCD, only the former reached statistical significance. Malicka (2014) also found different findings for Guiraud's Index and D, a measure computed by the program D_Tools but essentially the same as VOCD (Meara & Miralpeix, 2017). In Malicka's (2014) study, only D reached statistical significance.…”

Uneasy lies the head: Poststructuralism in the midst of paradigm contestation in applied linguistics

“…This follows hard on the heels of a previous special issue of Applied linguistics (33/5) that focussed on poststructuralism, presented as "challenging and disruptive perspectives" that embody "new modes of reasoning" (McNamara, 2012a: 481), as well as a renewed call for accountability and responsibility (McNamara, 2012b: 574). In other publications and presentations, there has been a new history of applied linguistics (De Bot, 2015), as well as the "mapping of applied linguistics" (see Meara, 2014), the latter tracing recurrent and historically important themes and trends across the major journals in the field. It is significant that two of the contributions in the 2015 special issue of Applied linguistics, by McNamara (2015) and Kramsch (2015), feature the same authors as in the 2012 edition on poststructuralism, a clear indication of the importance currently attached in applied linguistics to that particular late-postmodernist perspective.…”