Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge

Over the last 20 years vocabulary research has grown from a Cinderella subject to a position of some importance. Vocabulary is now considered integral to just about every aspect of language knowledge and is a lively and vital area of research and innovation. With this development have come standard and widely-used tests, such as vocabulary size and lexical richness measures, and commonly accepted metaphors, such as the mental lexicon as a web of words. Less widely known outside academic circles, however, is the extensive work on learners' lexis and the utility, reliability and validity of the tests we use to measure and investigate it. This volume brings together contributions from internationally-renowned researchers in this field to explain much of the background to study in this area. It introduces to a wider audience the concerns, the newest approaches and developments in the field of vocabulary research and testing.

Contents:

Editors' introduction. Conventions, terminology and an overview of the book / Helmut Daller, James Milton and Jeanine Treffers-Daller 
Fundamental issues in modelling and assessing vocabulary knowledge / Paul Nation
Lexical profiles, learning styles and the construct validity of lexical size tests / James Milton
Learners' response behaviour in Yes/No vocabulary tests / June Eyckmans, Hans Van de Velde, Roeland van Hout and Frank Boers
Validity and threats to the validity of vocabulary measurement / Brian Richards and David Malvern 
Comparing measures of lexical richness / Roeland van Hout and Anne Vermeer 
Productive vocabulary tests and the search for concurrent validity / Tess Fitzpatrick
Exploring measures of vocabulary richness in semi-spontaneous French speech / Françoise Tidball and Jeanine Treffers-Daller 
Lexical richness and the oral proficiency of Chinese EFL students / Helmut Daller and Huijuan Xue 
Implementing graph theory approaches to the exploration of density and structure in L1 and L2 word association networks / Clarissa Wilks and Paul Meara 
Insights into the structure of L1 and L2 vocabulary networks : intimations of small worlds / Ellen Schur 
Assessing vocabulary for the purpose of reading diagnosis / Hilde Hacquebord and Berend Stellingwerf 
The best of both worlds? Combined methodological approaches to the assessment of vocabulary in oral proficiency interviews / Nuria Lorenzo-Dus
What is in a teacher's mind? Teacher ratings of EFL essays and different aspects of lexical richness / Helmut Daller and David Phelan.