ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 175, Issue 1, 2024

Innovative resources for teaching vocabulary have emerged during the last decades, among which the so-called ‘graded resources’, i.e. lexicons or inventories where linguistic forms have been associated with a difficulty level, having in mind a target reader. The idea of ‘grading’ in Education is not new and has evolved over time: vocabulary or text scales (grades) have been approached as an educational tool with the means available at each period of time. In this survey, our aim is to show how current approaches of graded resources for foreign language learning are rooted in the tradition of building frequency lists for education. We then synthesize the body of work that has been undertaken to design graduated resources, highlighting the different methodologies applied as well as existing resources.

We describe a large-scale effort to map English-language vocabulary by U.S. school grade levels. Our motivation is to rapidly expand graded vocabulary resources for work with native English speakers in the USA, while taking into consideration school-related influences rather than relying on just the corpus-frequency approaches. We report on the initial effort of data collection, with mapping of about 22K word forms. We provide comparisons of this mapping to some other recent vocabulary mapping efforts, such as age-of-acquisition. We then describe the efforts to automatically expand this resource by using linguistically motivated variables and corpus-based methods. Our current resource maps more than 126K English word forms to US school grade levels. We also compare a subset of our L1 mapped data to English L2 vocabulary levels, as expressed on the CEFR scale, and find that there is a considerable overlap in the order of vocabulary learning in L1 and L2 English.

Collocations have become increasingly important in our understanding of foreign language learning. When it comes to setting vocabulary learning goals, concerns about how to address collocations still arise today. This article explores the distribution of collocations in L1 and L2 Spanish production with the ultimate goal of informing the design of graded lexical inventories of multi-word combinations. To do so, we explore three defining properties of collocations in L1 and L2 production data, and across different levels of L2 proficiency: syntactic structure, semantic transparency, and the strength of association. Results indicate that there is an increase of collocational density and diversity, but that isolated features of collocations fail to predict L2 proficiency. Findings suggest the need to evaluate collocation use at a high level of granularity.

MWE knowledge is key in the process of learning a foreign language, but its teaching remains hindered by the lack of list of expressions connected to pedagogical aims. In this paper, we present an extended version of the PolylexFLE database, containing 4,525 French multiword expressions (MWE) of three types: idioms, collocations or fixed expressions. In order to propose exercises following the difficulty scale of the European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), we used a mixed approach (manual and automatic) to annotate 1,186 expressions according to the CEFR levels. The paper focuses mostly on the automatic procedure that first identifies the expressions from the PolylexFLE database (and their variants) in a corpus of pedagogical texts (with CEFR labels) using a pattern-based system. In a second step, their distribution in this corpus is estimated and transformed into a single CEFR level. The automatic approach proposed is finally evaluated by 52 French as foreign language learners.

The study aims to demonstrate the procedure for constructing the CEFR-based Sentence Profile (CEFR-SP), a dataset with the CEFR levels assigned for sentences, and to identify the characteristics at each level. Basic statistics such as word length and sentence length are presented for each CEFR level for 7,511 carefully selected sentences, and statistical tests are conducted between adjacent levels to identify criterial features. The findings reveal significant differences in word length between adjacent levels, while word difficulty is not significant in discriminating levels at either end (A1–A2, C1–C2). Sentence length and depth are also not significant discriminators for higher levels (B2–C1, C1–C2). Notably, sentence-level data generally exhibit discriminative values compared to text-level statistics, indicating their direct capture of characteristics at each CEFR level.

The article introduces a novel lexical resource for Swedish based on word family principles. The development of the Swedish Word Family (SweWF) resource is set into the context of linguistic complexity in second language acquisition. The SweWF is particularly appropriate for that, given that it contains lexical items used in second language corpora, namely, in a corpus of coursebook texts, and in a corpus of learner essays. The main focus of the article is on the construction of the resource with its user interface and on its applicability for research, although it also opens vast possibilities for practical applications for language learning, testing and assessment. We demonstrate the value of the resource through several case studies.