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Abstract

There have been great strides made in research on vocabulary in the last 30 years. However, there has been relatively little progress in the development of new vocabulary tests. This may be due in some degree to the impressive contributions made by tests such as the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation, 1983; Schmitt et al., 2001) and the Word Associates Test (Read, 1993, 1998). In this report, an argument is made that there is a need for the development of new vocabulary tests. The justification for the development of new tests will be discussed and four new tests that are in different stages of development will be briefly introduced. The first two expand on the contributions of the Vocabulary Levels Test. One is a new version of the Vocabulary Levels Test and the other measures knowledge of the different sublists of Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List. The second two tests measure a different aspect of vocabulary knowledge, vocabulary learning proficiency. The Guessing from Context Test was designed to measure the ability to guess words in context and the Word Part Levels Test measures knowledge of affixes.

Keywords

Vocabulary Levels Test affixes guessing from context academic vocabulary depth of vocabulary knowledge

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New Directions In Vocabulary Testing

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