I have participated in a guest
lecture by Professor Norbert Schmitt from the University of Nottingham (UK), that I found interesting. The
lecture was held at the University of Oslo in conjunction with a network
meeting of LUNAS
(Language Use in Nordic Academic Settings) and was supported by the
Nordplus Nordic Languages Programme and the Department of Linguistics and
Scandinavian Studies.
Schmitt focused the lecture around four
main questions related to assessment of vocabulary:
1)
Why do you want to assess?
2)
What words do you want to
assess?
3)
What kind of knowledge do you
want to assess?
4)
Which item format do you want to
assess?
The lecture was given in a very interactive
manner and the participants actively participated to contextualize the talk
from different perspectives. Below I will give a very short summary of what I have
taken away with me from participating in that lecture.
Under the heading Why do you want to assess/test?, Schmitt mentioned a number of
different purposes of assessments. The purpose of the measuring could e.g. be
to look at achievement, for motivation, to see what the students already know,
to identify shortfalls in lexical knowledge, diagnostic, proficiency, to look
at the short term or long term effect of an intervention etc. This means that
the purpose therefore differs according to context but whether it is related to
practice or research the purpose may not only be related to vocabulary
knowledge but also the language use. Therefore not only a vocabulary score
should be considered but rather what the vocabulary score means.
Determining What words do you want to assess depends on the purpose of the
assessment but Schmitt also clearly highlighted
that word frequency may be the best
tool to decide on which words to assess (e.g. the COCA corpus; http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/).
He realized this is not a perfect tool for selecting relevant words to include but
suggested it to be the most relevant. For younger children, however, a written corpus
will make no sense and the corpus should rather be based on talks occurring
between teacher/pre-school teacher and their students/children, and talks
between parents and their children, as these may then be preferable.
What
kind of knowledge should be assessed depends on the purpose of the assessment. Schmitt referred to
Nation ‘s word knowledge aspects (2001) and the component form, meaning and use
which originally may have been adapted from Bloom and Lahey (1978).
Which
item format to assess is also related to the purpose
of the assessment. It could be e.g. multiple choice item format, matching
vocabulary, recall item format by context or by definition. Schmitt’s examples
were taken from work with second language learners and students, no examples
from young children were given. However, a work in progress by Benjamin Kremmel
looking at the relationship between clinical test results and the results from
interview/talk with the informants may possibly give the same result across
age?
Kremmel found ca 20% overestimation of the vocabulary
scores when multiple choices and matching were compared to the interview. While recall definition and recall context
result in an underestimation of scores by approximately 15-19%. Low frequency
words result in guessing and both overestimating and underestimating occurs.
This means that considering how to report results from vocabulary assessments is
very important. Instead of reporting that an individual knows words or has learnt words (which may
include derivations and collocation), and assuming that the words are known and
used regardless of contexts, we rather should refer to the specific context in
our reporting of the results.
Finally, Schmitt also referred to an
article he had written together with Zimmermann (2002) focusing on word
families versus lemmas. In their study they found that we cannot make the
assumption that word families are known by students (e.g. noun, verb, adjective
and adverb/persistence, persist, persistent, persistently). The students had
higher scores on recognition compared to expression of items but different word
forms were directly accessible for the students in general. Therefore Schmitt
suggested lemmas to be an actual compromise between word families and
individual words.
I think Schmitt gave a good and very
engaging talk about a very interesting topic. However, I found that a very
important question was missing in his talk, namely - who would you like to
assess? Typically there is little focus on the group under investigation but to
reveal assessment results of high quality the group under investigation should also
be considered.
References:
Bloom,
L. & Lahey, M. (1978). Language development and language disorders. New
York:
John
Wiley & Sons.
Nation,
I.S. P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge UK:
CambridgeUniversity Press.
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