Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
net/publication/312063998
CITATIONS READS
24 2,403
2 authors:
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
All content following this page was uploaded by James Milton on 22 June 2017.
PROOF
12
Vocabulary Size and the Common
European Framework of Reference
for Languages
James Milton* and Thomaï Alexiou**
*
Swansea University, UK
**
Aegean University, Greece
Introduction
194
in Spain, Hungary, Greece and Britain, learning English, French and Greek
as foreign languages. By looking at modern foreign language learners at
different levels we should be able to see whether the vocabulary knowl-
edge changes systematically as the language level of learners increases. It
would be expected that learners at the lower levels of the hierarchy, A1 or
A2, would know fewer words and expressions in the foreign language than
learners who are very advanced and who are taking courses or studying for
exams at C1 or C2 level. This in turn raises the possibility of comparing
vocabulary knowledge levels across languages and across different language
systems; is the knowledge of French learners in Britain, say, comparable
in some meaningful way to the knowledge of Greek learners of French
or even Greek learners of English? It is not always obvious how to com-
pare knowledge across different languages but one method for comparing
vocabulary sizes will be proposed and examined. This should begin to tell
us whether the CEFR hierarchies are as robust as we would like them to be,
and whether vocabulary size measures can help to add a useful degree of
precision to the difficult art of placing learners at the correct CEFR level.
language ability such as scores on the Cambridge IELTS test (Milton, Wade
and Hopkins, forthcoming). They also correlate well with all four skills, and
with reading and writing in particular. Staehr (forthcoming), for example, is
able to gain correlations of .83 between scores gained by his 88 testees on a
test of receptive vocabulary size (Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham, 2001) and
on a multiple choice test of reading comprehension. A correlation of .73 was
found with the same group between vocabulary scores and assessments on
an academic writing task. Both correlations are statistically significant. While
lower correlations are found by Staehr with listening and speaking skill scores,
his results still explain between 35 and 40 per cent of variance in the scores
for these skills. Using a combination of both phonological and orthographic
tests of vocabulary size, Milton et al. (forthcoming) are able to explain over
40 per cent of variance on scores in IELTS speaking and listening sub-skill
scores. This suggests, perhaps not surprisingly, that the skills of listening and
speaking access different lexical resources from reading and writing. Listening
and speaking rely on aural word knowledge; reading and writing on knowl-
edge of the written form of words. Nonetheless, they emphasize how impor-
tant vocabulary knowledge is to all language skills. Other studies suggest that
vocabulary size scores correlate well with hours of instruction and teacher
assessments (Orosz, 2007) and with the size and frequency distribution of the
vocabulary content available to learners in course books (Vassiliu, 2001).
There is good reason for thinking, therefore, that if the CEFR has validity
as a hierarchy of language level and ability, then each succeeding increase
in level in the CEFR should be matched by an increasing demand in the
vocabulary knowledge of the learners who take exams at that level. With
each progressively higher CEFR band, there should be higher mean scores
on vocabulary size measures with groups of learners. If this were not seen
then the validity of the CEFR would be called into question. The word lists
in the early CEFR materials appear to reflect this pattern. The Threshold (B1)
level word lists are indeed larger, implying greater knowledge by learners at
this level, than the Waystage (A2) material lists. The information included
with Meara and Milton’s (2003, p. 5) Swansea Levels Test (XLex), explicitly
links the EFL vocabulary size scores to attainment in Cambridge EFL exams
and these exams, of course, have a place in the hierarchy of CEFR levels.
The range of scores they suggest for each level is shown in Table 12.1.
Vocabulary size measures also have a distinct benefit in language meas-
urement terms, of being, or appearing to be, more countable and therefore
objective, than the kind of subjective evaluations of level which abound
in other aspects of language. Modern methodology, for example Meara
and Jones’s Eurocentre’s Vocabulary Size Test (EVST) (1990), allows a numeri-
cal estimate of a learner’s vocabulary to be made, and a learner with, say,
2000 words out of the 10,000 in this test, can be argued to have double
the knowledge of another learner with only 1000 words. It is impossible in
the current state of knowledge to characterize knowledge of grammatical
Recent years have seen the development of rather more systematic and prin-
cipled methods for estimating the vocabulary knowledge in foreign language
learners. There is considerable evidence that there is a strong frequency
effect in the learning of foreign language vocabulary (for example, Milton,
2007b). In effect this means that the more frequent a word is then the more
likely it is to be learned. This is not a perfect rule, of course. Word learn-
ing will also be dependent on what thematic material the learner has been
exposed to in textbooks and on word difficulty factors such as whether the
words encountered are cognate or not. But frequency still has a very power-
ful effect, probably more powerful than the other factors and, as a conse-
quence, recent vocabulary tests have drawn on frequency information and
focused their test items in the most frequent bands. Nation’s Vocabulary
Levels Test (Schmitt et al., 2001), Meara and Jones’s EVST (1990) and Meara
and Milton’s Swansea Levels Test XLex (2003) all do this, for example. What
emerges from these tests appears to be good characterizations of learners’
vocabulary knowledge. In the case of the latter two they provide believable
estimates of vocabulary size within the frequency bands they test.
In this chapter we have used vocabulary size estimates arrived at using
the XLex test which has the virtue of having equivalent versions available
in English, French and Greek. All three make estimates of knowledge of the
In EFL, the vocabulary size scores have been recorded in a state secondary
school in Hungary (Orosz, 2007) and in a private language school in Greece
(data from Milton, 2007b). The learners have been grouped according to the
CEFR level of the class they are in and, where appropriate, the CEFR level of
the exam they are taking. The learners in Greece routinely take the Cambridge
Preliminary English Test (PET) at level B1, Cambridge First Certificate in
English (FCE) at level B2 and Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English
(CPE) at level C2. Data were collected from 88 Greek learners at all CEFR lev-
els. The learners in Hungary take the state maturity exams at levels B1 and B2.
Data were collected from 144 Hungarian learners at these levels.
In French as a foreign language the vocabulary size scores have been
recorded in a state secondary school and university in Britain (Milton,
2006, 2008), two private language schools in Greece, and from two schools
in the Spanish state education system. The learners have been grouped
The mean vocabulary size scores at each CEFR level from the 88 EFL learn-
ers in Greece are presented in Table 12.2. The mean vocabulary size scores
for the 144 learners in Hungary at CEFR levels B1, B2 and C1 are presented
in Table 12.3. The XLex scores suggested in Meara and Milton (2003) are
Table 12.2 EFL vocabulary size and the CEFR among learners in Greece
Table 12.3 EFL vocabulary size and the CEFR among learners in Hungary
A1 ⬍1500
A2 1500–2500
B1 2750–3250 3135.90 4700 1130 434.79 66
B2 3250–3750 3668.42 4950 1880 666.50 72
C1 3750–4500 4340.00 4650 4000 471.07 6
C2 4500–5000
included for reference although it should be noted that the learners in this
case are in classes preparing to take EFL exams at the various CEFR levels, while
the XLex scores in Meara and Milton are for those actually taking the exams.
The results, superficially at least, look rather persuasive. There is a hier-
archy of CEFR levels in each case, and in each case also there is a hierarchy
of mean vocabulary size scores. Learners at A1 appear, on average, to know
fewer words than learners in level A2 who, in turn, know on average fewer
words than those in level B1, and so on up the levels. Even with relatively
small numbers it is possible to argue that this tendency is statistically sig-
nificant. An ANOVA on the Greek data confirms that there are significant
differences between the means at different levels, F(5, 82) ⫽ 50.197, p ⬍ .01,
and the same is true of the Hungarian data, F(2, 141) ⫽ 14.896, p ⬍ .01.
The two systems also appear, from this limited sample, to be similar and
conform quite closely to the levels of vocabulary knowledge suggested by
Meara and Milton (2003), especially at the lower levels. Both systems sug-
gest considerable vocabulary knowledge is required, approximately 3000
words, before learners progress from the elementary stages of performance
at A1 and A2 level to intermediate B1 level, and a score in region of 3500
words is associated with B2 level. Learners at Advanced levels know even
more than this. These encouraging similarities in mean scores disguise con-
siderable individual variation, however, as the maximum and minimum
scores and standard deviations reveal. While the mean scores for groups
suggest an encouraging general tendency, it seems likely that there are no
clear thresholds where a certain minimum score is a requirement of passing
from one level of skill or ability to another. The reasons why this might be
so are discussed later in the chapter.
The mean vocabulary size scores at each CEFR level from the 155 French
as a foreign language learners in Britain at CEFR levels B1, B2 and C2 are
presented in Table 12.4 The mean vocabulary size scores for the 65 learners
A1
A2
B1 952.04 1900 0 440.28 49
B2 1882.58 3650 650 562.21 89
C1
C2 3326.47 4150 2050 711.75 17
1000 words. In all cases the figures suggest that many fewer words in French
are required to achieve this level of proficiency than in EFL. As with the EFL
data, the mean scores, and general tendency of groups, disguise the wide
variety of individual scores which the standard deviation figures illustrate.
The mean vocabulary size scores at each CEFR level from the 64 Greek as
a foreign language learners at CEFR levels A1 A2, B1 and B2 are presented
in Table 12.7. As with the French figures, there are no guideline scores for
what vocabulary sizes might be associated with each level.
As with all the other sets of data, the Greek figures reveal a hierarchy of
vocabulary size scores for each successive CEFR level where we have results.
Again, an ANOVA confirms the relationship between CEFR levels and dif-
ferences in vocabulary size, F(3, 60) ⫽ 57.150, p ⬍ .01, and the differences
between the mean scores at each level are significant. The mean scores at
each level in these data are larger than the scores in the EFL and French as
a foreign language data. Again, there is considerable variation of individual
scores within each level and overlap in vocabulary scores between the levels.
The data from users of the CEFR system, collected from four countries and
three different foreign languages, show what one would expect. As learners
get better in their foreign languages, and move upwards through the CEFR
levels, they tend to know progressively more vocabulary. Regression analy-
sis allows the relationship between a learner’s vocabulary size and the CEFR
level he or she has attained to be modelled and suggests just how strong
the relationship between the two variables can be. A series of these analyses
have been carried out on the data collected for this chapter and give the
results shown in Table 12.8.
It appears that in Spain and Greece the CEFR level a learner achieves is
particularly sensitive to their vocabulary knowledge; 60–70 per cent of variance
levels in French have been interpreted very differently in Britain than else-
where in Europe.
A characteristic of all the French data is that mean vocabulary scores for
the CEFR levels are lower than for EFL. We have only one set of data for
learners of Greek as a foreign language, but these figures are higher than
those in either EFL or French. This, of course, raises the question of how the
CEFR levels in the different languages are to be compared. Does the lower
vocabulary score associated with French CEFR levels, for example, mean
that the French levels are lower and much easier to achieve than the EFL
ones, or do these differences reflect some systematic difference between the
languages whereby fewer lexical resources are needed in French to achieve
the kind of communicative skill that the CEFR levels describe?
100
80
% Coverage
60
40
20 French
English
0
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500
Words by frequency
Figure 12.1 A comparison of coverage of text between Carroll et al.’s (1971) corpus
of English and Baudot’s (1992) French corpus
100
80
% Coverage
60
40
20 Greek
English
0
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500
Words by frequency
Figure 12.2 A comparison of text coverage between Carroll et al.’s (1971) corpus of
English and the Hellenic National Corpus (Hatzipeorgiu et al., 2001)
ability that fewer words in English would allow. It might be expected, there-
fore, that levels of vocabulary knowledge required for the various CEFR
grades would be higher in Greek than in either English or French. What
happens when the vocabulary scores for the different languages at each
CEFR level are compared with each other? Do the differences in vocabulary
size which these coverage differences suggest, emerge in the CEFR frame-
work? In Table 12.9 we have presented all the vocabulary size mean scores
at each of the CEFR levels.
Encouragingly, these data support the differences which coverage fig-
ures suggest should occur. At every CEFR level the mean French vocabulary
scores are smaller than the mean scores for EFL at the equivalent levels and
at every level where we have data, the mean Greek vocabulary scores are
higher than both the mean EFL and French scores.
At one level these results have produced exactly what was hoped for and
expected. As learners get better in their foreign language, and become
more skilled, able and communicative, they tend to know more words. The
vocabulary size scores which emerge suggest that certain levels for vocabu-
lary knowledge are associated with performance at each CEFR level. This
supports the idea that the CEFR system can work in establishing equiva-
lent levels in foreign languages across different countries and examinations
systems. The EFL data in Greece and Hungary broadly conform well to the
vocabulary levels suggested by the writers of the vocabulary testing software
at each of the CEFR levels. The EFL system, at least in Greece, has the ben-
efit of being tied strongly to the Cambridge testing system which itself has
a vocabulary level attached to it in the form of Hindmarsh’s (1980) list. This
list of 4500 words and phrases should form the basis of test construction at
the Cambridge FCE (B2) level and the use of this list has probably helped fix
the standard of this exam over time. The mean vocabulary scores that learn-
ers produce at this level, approximately 3500 out of the 5000 most frequent
words, fit well with the kind of vocabulary size implicit in Hindmarsh’s list,
which includes not only the most frequent words required for communica-
tion but also words tied to the kind of thematic requirements of the FCE
exam and which lie outside the most frequent 5000 words of English.
French does not have a fixed point of reference like the Hindmarsh list to
help establish vocabulary norms at each CEFR level. Nonetheless, it is pos-
sible to argue that the French foreign language data from Greece and Spain
suggest that the CEFR’s skills-based criteria have allowed very similar levels
of knowledge to be tied to the CEFR levels. This suggests that the system
can be quite workable. The British data, however, reveal the weakness of
the skills-based criteria when used in isolation from more objective evalua-
tion methods. The British scores for learners of French are not just different
from the Greek and Spanish scores, they are so different that the abilities
of the learners in Britain cannot possibly be equivalent to learners at the
equivalent CEFR levels in Greece of Spain. The presence of a vocabulary
knowledge indicator will surely help the British system in evaluating where
it stands in relation to the CEFR and in adjusting its level appropriately so
that it will fit more convincingly within the framework. There appears,
therefore, to be a real place for these vocabulary size measures.
The vocabulary score hierarchies which have emerged from this exercise
appear to be different between languages. The EFL scores are higher than the
French foreign language scores, and the Greek vocabulary scores are higher
than both. There is no reason for thinking that the achievement of a level
of competence in the CEFR system should require a single vocabulary size
in all languages. Languages differ and it is quite likely that it is possible to
be rather more communicative and fluent with fewer vocabulary resources
in some languages than in others. It appears possible to argue, however, that
this kind of variation is linked to coverage which also varies from language
to language. The volume of data represented here is small but it suggests
that the CEFR levels are associated with levels of coverage of text, and that
these coverage figures will allow us to estimate vocabulary size equivalences
between languages. To progress from elementary, A1 and A2 levels, for
example, it seems that learners need to know a volume of vocabulary which
will give more than 80 per cent coverage. In EFL that would require knowl-
edge of over 2000 words and in French rather fewer. This in turn means that
vocabulary size guidelines can be produced across the languages to which
the CEFR is applied, tying it together in a way this is not possible at the
moment. At the moment we assume that the French learners at B2 level in
Greece and Spain, for example, are similar in performance and knowledge
to EFL learners at B2 level in Greece and Hungary, but we have no real way
of demonstrating this without reference to something like vocabulary levels.
It is early days, but this method of rationalizing how vocabulary size scores
in difference foreign languages might link to the CEFR looks promising and
would merit more systematic investigation with larger numbers of learners,
in more countries and learning more foreign languages.
These factors should not disguise a third reason for why vocabulary size
and ability level are not precisely tied and this reason is rather more impor-
tant in this context. This is that the relationship between foreign language
knowledge and the ability or skill in using that knowledge may vary from
one individual to another. Communicative ability in reading and listen-
ing, for example, rests to a degree on anticipating what is likely to come
next and in making intelligent guesses as to the meaning of the writer or
speaker. Some learners can use limited data and achieve comprehension
more easily than others who require more complete knowledge to draw
the same conclusions. Likewise, some foreign language users manage to be
much more creative and intuitive than others in their ability to use the lim-
ited language knowledge they have for communication. We have very little
understanding of this type of variation and have no real way of character-
izing it usefully. As a consequence we currently find it hard to explain away
completely satisfactorily the range of vocabulary scores that learners in the
same class, or at the same level, can produce, and this is an area that bears
further investigation.
For these reasons the kind of vocabulary data which is likely to emerge
and be most useful for the CEFR system will be ranges of vocabulary knowl-
edge associated with the CEFR levels, and which will act as guidelines.
Groups of learners might be expected to conform to these guidelines quite
well since the progress of vocabulary knowledge among groups of learners is
now becoming quite well understood. Individuals are likely to be less pre-
dictable, however, and while it is unlikely that learners will depart enor-
mously from the guidelines, some individuals are likely to fall outside any
vocabulary range that is set.
In conclusion, therefore, it seems that it is quite workable to put vocabulary
knowledge measures back into the CEFR. While specifying lists of required
vocabulary may no longer be appropriate, a vocabulary size metric can offer
much to the framework. The vocabulary size scores which emerge among
learners at different levels of the framework are relatively predictable and
understandable, and it appears that vocabulary size estimates are already asso-
ciated with each of the CEFR levels, even if users of the system are not aware
of this. This chapter has been able to codify what some of these levels are.
We have even suggested a way of handling and explaining the way vocabular-
ies will vary between languages so the CEFR system can remain generalizable
across all languages and countries. This process has already revealed the kind
of discrepancy to which a system without an objective style of measurement
is prone, and it has highlighted the way the British placements of foreign lan-
guage qualifications appear very different from the kind of expectations which
are common on the rest of the continent of Europe. By reintroducing a vocab-
ulary size measure to the CEFR the system can, very likely, be made more
robust so that misplacements of this kind can be recognized and corrected.