Past Event

After Twenty Years: Vocabulary Assessment in Applied Linguistics

We discovered our shared interests in second language vocabulary and language assessment in the mid-1990s. In 2001 we published a joint article in which we explored issues of construct definition in the assessment of second language vocabulary ability, distinguishing in particular between the then-dominant trait definitions of vocabulary and a more interactionalist approach which was gaining prominence in the field. This session gives us the opportunity to revisit some of the questions we addressed in that earlier publication in the light of our current research agendas. Dr. Read will discuss the continuing prevalence of trait-based tests of L2 vocabulary knowledge, and outline a fresh approach to the assessment of academic vocabulary ability in a more contextualized way. Then Dr. Chapelle will explain why multifaceted validation studies are required particularly for contextualized measures of vocabulary ability and how argument-based validation is used to integrate results from a range of studies into a single validity argument. We will both highlight ways in which our work draws on concepts and procedures from other areas of Applied Linguistics and, during the discussion time which follows, we would welcome comments about how the ideas we present might apply to other areas within the discipline.

About the Presenters

Carol A. Chapelle is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. She is editor of the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) as well as co-editor of Language Testing and the Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series of books. She is past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and former editor of TESOL Quarterly. Her recent books include The Handbook of Technology and Second Language Teaching and Learning (with S. Sauro; Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and Teaching Culture in Introductory Foreign Language Textbooks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). She is currently working on projects that help to connect evaluation methods for learning materials and validation methods for assessment.

John Read is Professor of Applied Language Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is a former co-editor of Language Testing and served as Vice-President and then President of the International Language Testing Association from 2009 to 2012. He is author of Assessing Vocabulary (Cambridge, 2000) and Assessing English Proficiency for University Study (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and editor of Post-admission Language Assessment of University Students (Springer, 2016). Currently he is Chair of the Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) to be held in Auckland in July 2018. His continuing research interests are in the design of second language vocabulary tests and the assessment of academic literacy.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies.