With the increasing interest on the part of both researchers and language teaching specialists in the study of vocabulary acquisition by L2 learners, there is a need to have suitable instruments to measure learners' knowledge of words. The purpose of this article is to report on an investigation of a new test format, which was designed to go beyond conventional vocabulary test items - that simply allow for a yes/no judgement on whether a word is known - by providing a practical way of assessing the quality of word knowledge, that is, how well particular words are known.
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