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A developmental perspective on productive lexical knowledge in L2 oral interlanguage1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

ANNABELLE DAVID
ANNABELLE DAVID*
Affiliation:
Newcastle University
*
Address for correspondence: Annabelle David, School of Modern Languages, Old Library Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK e-mail: annabelle.david@ncl.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article reports on productive vocabulary development by instructed British learners of French over a five-year period (from age 13 to 18). Lexical diversity development was investigated through a semi-guided oral picture-based task. Results show that the students' lexical diversity (as measured by D) did significantly improve throughout the five years showing little sign of slower periods. Overall more noun types were observed than verb types in the composition of the lexicon throughout the study but with a consistent decrease in its proportion after Year 10. Further results using the Limiting Relative Diversity measure indicate that learners vary their use of nouns to a much larger extent than verbs. The discussion focuses on the noun-bias hypothesis and the use of different elicitation tasks.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 18 , Special Issue 3: Knowledge and use of the lexicon in French as a second language , November 2008 , pp. 315 - 331
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

1

The research reported here is based on data collected during the FLLOC project (directed by Florence Myles and Ros Mitchell) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) award numbers R000223421, RES000220070, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) RE-AN9057/APN-15456, AR112118 and the British Academy SG 41141 since 2001, at the University of Southampton and Newcastle University. Special thanks go to all of the participants and native speakers for their help with data collection and transcription. The author would like to thank: Sarah Rule for her help with checking the lemmatisation of the data, Florence Myles, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this paper.

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