Lexical measures for testing progress in Hebrew as Arab students’ L2

Abstract

Since Ure (1971) and Halliday (1985), different measures have been proposed in the research literature as a proxy for investigating lexicon advance. They are called lexical richness measures and are an important tool in assessing advance of the lexicon (Johansson, 2009). This article evaluates three lexical richness measures of progress in the acquisition of Hebrew by Arab students in Israel: level of abstractness, lexical diversity, and density lexical. My corpus consisted of fifty essays written in Hebrew by 9th and 11th graders. The quantitative analysis reveals several findings. First, abstractness increases with subjects’ age, as expected. The density test, however, did not show the expected increase in density with age. I suspect the reason for this is relatively high density in younger pupils’ essays, indicating lack of cohesion rather than high linguistic competence. The national high school language curriculum for eleventh graders focuses on connectivity, which causes a decrease in density. Third, the diversity test also did not yield statistically significant findings, probably because this test is influenced by text length, which in the ninth grade still does not enable a reliable test. Conclusions: The lexical measures can be divided into two types: basic tests, that can be applied at any level of competence; and advanced tests, which require a high level of competence. Level of abstractness is of the first type: it is effective as a measure of progress in L2 acquisition even in the initial stages of acquisition, while diversity and density require a higher competence level.

Keywords

• Second language acquisition
• lexicon development
• assessing writing
• level of abstractness
• lexical diversity
• lexical density

References

1. Abdalla, F., Robb, M. P., & Al-Shatti, T. (2010). Stuttering and lexical category in adult Arabic speakers. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 24(1), 70-81.‏‏
2. Amara, M. H. (1999). Politics and sociolinguistic reflexes: Palestinian border villages (Vol. 19). John Benjamins Publishing.
3. Amara, M., & Mar'i, A. A. R. (2002). Language education policy: The Arab minority in Israel. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
4. August, D. (Ed.), Shanahan, T. (Ed.). (2006). Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners. New York: Routledge. doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315094922.
5. Bogaards, P. (2001). Lexical units and the learning of foreign language vocabulary. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 23, 321-343.
6. Borghi, A. M., Barca, L., Binkofski, F., & Tummolini, L. (2018). Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
7. Borghi, A. M., Binkofski, F., Castelfranchi, C., Cimatti, F., Scorolli, C., & Tummolini, L. (2017). The challenge of abstract concepts. Psychological Bulletin, 143(3), 263.
8. Borràs, J., & Llanes, À. (2020). L2 reading and vocabulary development after a short Study Abroad experience. Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17, 35-55.‏

9. Bürki, A., Elbuy, S., Madec, S., & Vasishth, S. (2020). What did we learn from forty years of research on semantic interference? A Bayesian meta-analysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 114, 104125.‏
10. Central Bureau of Statistics, 2019. Available online at: https://www.cbs.gov.il/en/mediarelease/Pages/2019/Israel-in-Figures-Selected-Annual-Data-2019.aspx.
11. Choi, W., & Jeong, H. (2016). Finding an appropriate lexical diversity measurement for a small-sized corpus and its application to a comparative study of L2 learners’ writings. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 75(21), 13015-13022.
12. Crossley, S. A., & Skalicky, S. (2019). Examining lexical development in second language learners: An approximate replication of salsbury, crossley & McNamara (2011). Language Teaching, 52(3), 385-405.
13. Daller, H., Van Hout, R., & Treffers‐Daller, J. (2003). Lexical richness in the spontaneous speech of bilinguals. Applied linguistics, 24(2), 197-222.
14. David, A. (2008). Vocabulary breadth in French L2 learners. Language Learning Journal, 36(2), 167-180.
15. Demir-Vegter, S., Aarts, R., & Kurvers, J. (2014). Lexical richness in maternal input and vocabulary development of Turkish preschoolers in the Netherlands. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 43(2), 149-165.
16. Dillard, J. P., & Pfau, M. (2002). The persuasion handbook: Developments in theory and practice. Sage Publications.
17. Dimroth, C. (2008). Age effects on the process of L2 acquisition? Evidence from the acquisition of negation and finiteness in L2 German. Language learning, 58(1), 117-150.‏ doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0261444817000362.
18. Ebedy, D. (2020). Developing Lexical Richness among EFL Students: Effect of Morphological Awareness Training on Writing Performance. Journal of Research in Curriculum Instruction and Educational Technology, 6(2), 45-68. doi: http://10.21608/jrciet.2020.80131‏.
19. Ferré, P., Sánchez‐Casas, R., & Guasch, M. (2006). Can a horse be a donkey? Semantic and form interference effects in translation recognition in early and late proficient and nonproficient Spanish‐Catalan bilinguals. Language Learning, 56(4), 571-608.‏
20. Fitzpatrick, T., Al-Qarni, I., & Meara, P. (2008). Intensive vocabulary learning: A case study. Language Learning Journal, 36(2), 239-248.
21. Flynn, S., & O'Neil, W. (Eds.). (2012). Linguistic theory in second language acquisition (Vol. 8). Springer Science & Business Media.‏
22. Gebril, A., & Plakans, L. (2016). Source-based tasks in academic writing assessment: Lexical diversity, textual borrowing and proficiency. Journal of English for academic purposes, 24, 78-88.
23. Gharibi, K., & Boers, F. (2019). Influential factors in lexical richness of young heritage speakers’ family language: Iranians in New Zealand. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(2), 381-399.‏
24. Ha, H. S. (2019). Lexical Richness in EFL Undergraduate Students' Academic Writing. English Teaching, 74(3), 3-28.‏
25. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). Spoken and written language. Victoria: Deakin University Press.
26. Halliday, M.A.K. (1989). Spoken and written language. (2nd Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
27. Harrison, S., & Bakker, P. (1998). Two new readability predictors for the professional writer: pilot trials. Journal of Research in Reading, 21(2), 121-138.‏
28. Henkin, R. (2011). Hebrew and Arabic in asymmetric contact in Israel. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 6(2), 195-228.
29. Hess, C. W., Sefton, K. M., & Landry, R. G. (1986). Sample size and type-token ratios for oral language of preschool children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 29(1), 129-134.
30. Hilton, H. (2008). The link between vocabulary knowledge and spoken L2 proficiency. Language Learning Journal, 36(2), 153-166.
31. Jarvis, S. (2012). Lexical challenges in the intersection of applied linguistics and ANLP. In C. Boonthum-Denecke, P.M. McCarthy, & T.A. Lamkin (Eds.), Cross-disciplinary advances in applied natural language processing: Issues and approaches (pp. 50-72). Hershey, PA: IGI Publishing.
32. Jarvis, S. (2013). Capturing the diversity in lexical diversity. Language Learning, 63, 87-106.
33. Jarvis, S. (2017). Grounding lexical diversity in human judgments. Language Testing, 34(4), 537-553.
34. Jiang, N. (2007). Semantic transfer and development in adult L2 vocabulary acquisition. In H. Daller, J. Milton, & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Modelling and assessing vocabulary knowledge (pp. 101-126). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
35. Johansson, V. (2009). Lexical diversity and lexical density in speech and writing: A developmental perspective. Lund Working Papers in Linguistics, 53, 61-79.
36. Johnson, W. (1939). Language and speech hygiene: An application of general semantics. Chicago: Institute of General Semantics.
37. Johnson, W. (1944). Studies in language behavior: A program of research. Psychological Monographs, 56(2), 1-15.‏
38. Juanggo, W. (2018). Investigating lexical diversity and lexical sophistication of productive vocabulary in the written discourse of Indonesian EFL learners. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 38-48.‏
39. Juste, F. S., Sassi, F. C., & de Andrade, C. R. F. (2012). Exchange of disfluency with age from function to content words in Brazilian Portuguese speakers who do and do not stutter. Clinical linguistics & phonetics, 26(11-12), 946-961.
40. Khamahani, G. (2015). A corpus-based analysis of Tehran Times and Azeri News headlines: Focus on lexical density and readability. International Journal of Humanities Social Sciences and Education (IJHSSE), 2(1), 12-16.‏
41. Koizumi, R. (2012). Relationships between text length and lexical diversity measures: Can we use short texts of less than 100 tokens?. Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, 1(1), 60-69.‏
42. Koizumi, R., & In'nami, Y. (2012). Effects of text length on lexical diversity measures: Using short texts with less than 200 tokens. System, 40(4), 522-532.
43. Kojima, M., & Yamashita, J. (2014). Reliability of lexical richness measures based on word lists in short second language productions. System, 42, 23-33.‏
44. Kroll, J., & Tokowicz, N. (2001). The development of conceptual representation for words in a second language. In J. Nicol (Eds.), One Mind, Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing (pp. 49-71). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
45. Kyle, K. (2019). Measuring Lexical Richness. In S. Webb (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Vocabulary Studies (pp. 454-475). New York: Routledge.
46. Laufer, B., & Hulstijn, J. (2001). Incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language: The construct of task-induced involvement. Applied linguistics, 22(1), 1-26.
47. Lefebvre, C., White, L., & Jourdan, C. (Eds.). (2006). L2 acquisition and Creole genesis: dialogues (Vol. 42). John Benjamins Publishing.‏
48. Lu, X. (2012). The relationship of lexical richness to the quality of ESL learners’ oral narratives. The Modern Language Journal, 96(2), 190-208.‏
49. MacWhinney, B. (2005). A unified model of language acquisition. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. De Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 49-67). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
50. Malvern, D., & Richards, B. (2002). Investigating accommodation in language proficiency interviews using a new measure of lexical diversity. Language Testing, 19(1), 85-104.‏
51. Malvern, D., Richards, B., Chipere, N., & Durán, P. (2004). Lexical diversity and language development. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
52. Mayer, K. M., Macedonia, M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2017). Recently learned foreign abstract and concrete nouns are represented in distinct cortical networks similar to the native language. Human Brain Mapping, 38(9), 4398-4412.
53. McCarthy, P. M., & Jarvis, S. (2007). Vocd: A theoretical and empirical evaluation. Language Testing, 24(4), 459-488.
54. McCarthy, P. M., & Jarvis, S. (2010). MTLD, vocd-D, and HD-D: A validation study of sophisticated approaches to lexical diversity assessment. Behavior Research Methods, 42(2), 381-392.
55. Meara, P., & Fitzpatrick, T. (2000). Lex30: An improved method of assessing productive vocabulary in an L2. System, 28(1), 19-30.
56. Ministry of Education (2011). Hebrew as 2nd language in Arabic schools in Israel, 9-12th grade. Ministry of Education. Jerusalem. Available online at: http://cms.education.gov.il/NR/rdonlyres/202A56F5-EC9E-43CD-9592-0EAE76451DF2/212803/29916.pdf.
57. Mondria, J., & Wiersma, B. (2007). Receptive, productive, and receptive + productive L2 vocabulary learning: What difference does it make?. In H. Daller, J. Milton, & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge (pp. 79-100). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
58. Mor-Sommerfeld, A., Azaiza, F., & Hertz-Lazarowitz, R. (2007). Into the future: Towards bilingual education in Israel. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 2(1), 5-22.‏
59. Nassaji, H. (2020). Assessing the effectiveness of interactional feedback for L2 acquisition: Issues and challenges. Language Teaching, 53(1), 3-28.‏
60. Nation, I.S.P. (2005). Teaching and learning vocabulary. In E. Hinkel (Eds.), Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 581-595). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
61. Nation, I.S.P. (2007). Fundamental issues in modelling and assessing vocabulary knowledge. In H. Daller, J. Milton, & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge (pp. 33-43). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
62. Olshtain E., Cohen E. (2005) Logical connectors in Hebrew: How well do eighth-graders master them?. In: Ravid D.D., Shyldkrot H.BZ. (Eds.), Perspectives on Language and Language Development (pp. 315-326). Boston, MA: Springer.
63. Paivio, A., Yuille, J. C., & Madigan, S. A. (1968). Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns. Journal of experimental psychology, 76, 1–25.
64. Polio, C. (2001). Research methodology in second language writing research: The case of text-based studies. In T. Silva, & P.K. Matsuda (Eds.), On Second Language Writing (pp. 91-115). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
65. Prior, A., Degani, T., Awawdy, S., Yassin, R., & Korem, N. (2017). Is susceptibility to cross-language interference domain specific?. Cognition, 165, 10-25.‏
66. Qian, D. (2004). Second language lexical inferencing: Preferences, perceptions, and practices. In P. Bogaards, & B. Laufer (Eds.), Vocabulary in a Second Language: Selection, Acquisition, and Testing (pp. 155-169). Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
67. Ravid, D. (2005). Emergence of linguistic complexity in later language development: Evidence from expository text construction. In D. Ravid, & H. Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot (Eds.), Perspectives on Language and Language Development (pp. 337-355). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
68. Ravid, D. (2006). Semantic development in textual contexts during the school years: Noun scale analyses. Journal of Child Language, 33(4), 791-821.
69. Saiegh-Haddad, E. (2003). Linguistic distance and initial reading acquisition: The case of Arabic diglossia. Applied Psycholinguistic, 24(3), 431-451.
70. Saiegh-Haddad, E., & Jayusy, A. (2016). Metalinguistic awareness in reading Hebrew L2. Acquisition and Development of Hebrew: From Infancy to Adolescence, 19, 353-386.
71. Šišková, Z. (2012). Lexical richness in EFL students’ narratives. Language Studies Working Papers, 4, 26-36.‏
72. Tanaka, S. (2012). New directions in L2 lexical development. Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, 1(1), 1-9.
73. Tweedie, F. J., & Baayen, R. H. (1998). How variable may a constant be? Measures of lexical richness in perspective. Computers and the Humanities, 32(5), 323-352.‏
74. Ure, J. (1971). Lexical density and register differentiation. In G.E. Perren, & J .M. Trim (Eds.), Applications of Linguistics (pp. 443-452). London: Cambridge University Press.
75. Vedder, I., & Benigno, V. (2016). Lexical richness and collocational competence in second-language writing. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 54(1), 23-42.‏
76. Vermeer, A. (2001). Breadth and depth of vocabulary in relation to L1/L2 acquisition and frequency of input. Applied psycholinguistics, 22(2), 217-234.
77. Webb, S. (Ed.). (2019). The Routledge Handbook of Vocabulary Studies. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429291586.
78. Wood, C. L., Bustamante, K. N., Schatschneider, C., & Hart, S. (2019). Relationship between children’s lexical diversity in written narratives and performance on a standardized reading vocabulary measure. Assessment for Effective Intervention, 44(3), 173-183.
79. Zhai, L. (2016). A study on Chinese EFL learners’ vocabulary usage in writing. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 7(4), 752-759.
80. Zhang, Y (2005) Processing and formal instruction in the L2 acquisition of five Chinese grammatical morphemes. In: Pienemann, M (Eds.), Cross-linguistic aspects of Processability Theory (pp. 155-177). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
81. Zheng, Y. (2016). The complex, dynamic development of L2 lexical use: A longitudinal study on Chinese learners of English. System, 56, 40-53.‏