The development of a new measure of L2 vocabulary knowledge

Abstract

With the increasing interest on the part of both researchers and language teaching specialists in the study of vocabulary acquisition by L2 learners, there is a need to have suitable instruments to measure learners' knowledge of words. The purpose of this article is to report on an investigation of a new test format, which was designed to go beyond conventional vocabulary test items - that simply allow for a yes/no judgement on whether a word is known - by providing a practical way of assessing the quality of word knowledge, that is, how well particular words are known.