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Show & Tell Presentation Workshop Presentation

Matching learners with meaning-focused: The development of a lexical profiler and reading or listening vocabulary levels tests appropriate for L2 English Japanese university learners

Sun, Jun 6, 15:15-16:30 Asia/Tokyo Room B

Considering the goals of meaning-focused learning activities, the existing vocabulary levels tests and lexical profilers fail to match most Japanese EFL learners with lexically appropriate meaning-focused or fluency development materials (Stoeckel, McLean & Nation, 2020). This presentation shows how through the use of https://vocableveltest.org/ and https://nwlc.pythonanywhere.com/ Japanese EFL learners can be more appropriately matched with lexically appropriate materials. These tools allow teachers to more accurately establish a learner's reading or listening lexical level (knowledge that can be employed when reading or listening) and the lexical load of target materials (and then edit them if necessary). This workshop will first introduce self-marking online vocabulary listening and reading levels tests based on a more appropriate (a) word counting unit (flemma), (b) item-format (meaning-recall), (c) word-band size (500), (d) sampling ratio (40/500), and (e) combined frequency and difficulty vocabulary list that considers loanword status. A parallel profiler based on the same wordlist can profile texts at 250 or 1000-word levels. The increased precision of the levels test and profilers mean that they can match even very low L2 English proficiency learners with lexically appropriate materials. Second, the workshop demonstrates how to interpret the results of levels tests and lexical profilers when making meaning-focused or fluency development materials online. Finally, participants will be encouraged to provide feedback and critique the online tools considering their educational settings.

  • Stuart McLean

    Stuart McLean (TESOL Ph.D., Medical Ph.D., & P.G.C.E) teaches at Momoyama Gakuin University. He greatly enjoys post-graduate teaching and supervision. He has published in Studies in Second Language Accusation, Reading in a Foreign Language, Vocabulary Learning and Instruction, Language Teaching Research, TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, Language Testing, System, and Language Assessment Quarterly. https://vocableveltest.org/