Speaker Series | Modalities of Vocabulary Testing

Wednesday, November 19, 2025 from 10:00 am to 11:00 am

• In-person event
• 501, Southam Hall, Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

Please join the School of Linguistics and Language Studies for a Speaker Series event featuring Dr. Jeffrey Stewart (Tokyo University of Science).

Modalities of Vocabulary Testing

In recent years there has been increasing debate in the field about how best to test written receptive vocabulary knowledge, as some researchers (e.g., Kremmel & Schmitt, 2016; Stoeckel, McLean & Nation, 2021) now argue that meaning recall tests, where learners provide free response L1 translations of L2 word forms, better capture the form of vocabulary knowledge necessary for reading than meaning recognition formats, where learners select a translation of an L2 written form from a fixed set of options (i.e., multiple choice tests such as Beglar & Nation’s Vocabulary Size Test; Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham’s Vocabulary Levels Test).

In this presentation Dr. Stewart will explain the implication of these issues for learners and researchers in the broader field of Second Language Acquisition, overview the ongoing debate in the literature by review studies that compare correlations of the two modalities to L2 reading proficiency, discuss the practical advantages and disadvantages of each format, and present recent research on how the practical challenges of scoring meaning recall tests can be mitigated using AI scoring, showing comparisons of LLM-scored tests to scoring conducted by humans.

Dr. Stewart received his Master’s degree from Temple University in Fukuoka, Japan and his PhD from Swansea University in the United Kingdom. He is an Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Science and is currently a Visiting Scholar at Carleton University.