Vocabulary assessment in standard tasks

Abstract

Research on tasks carried out so far has usually neglected lexical aspects of learners’ production and it has normally dealt with English as a target language. Besides, only few studies present a native speakers’ baseline to compare the results obtained by the learners. The aim of this study is to analyse how two narrative tasks can influence lexical performance and how this performance can be assessed with intrinsic and extrinsic vocabulary measures. A total of 35 Italian native speakers and 2 groups of 35 Catalan/Spanish learners of Italian (intermediate vs. advanced levels) took part in the study by writing two different stories. Results show that the tasks with more elements elicit more vocabulary and more lexically diverse output than the task with less elements. Results also indicate that the two tasks used can discriminate across proficiency levels and shed light on research related to measurements issues.