This paper describes the construction and validation of a bank of environmental supports for vocabulary and verbal reasoning tests in English in Zimbabwe. The bank exploits advances in corpus linguistics to provide systematic information on word usage in Zimba bwean school textbooks. Correlations with ranked item difficulties of existing texts confirmed the validity of the bank for vocabulary tasks, which was higher for a sample from less privileged schools. The bank showed less capacity to support the verbal reasoning task. At this juncture it is not possible to discern whether the fault lies with limitations of the bank or with the artificiality of the task.
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