The auditory picture vocabulary test for English L2: A spoken receptive meaning-recognition test intended for Dutch-speaking L2 learners of English

Abstract

When students start learning English as a foreign language (EFL), they often already know many words because they have had many opportunities to engage with the English language outside the classroom. Therefore, we have developed a spoken receptive meaning-recognition vocabulary test so that teachers can gain insight into the learners’ degree of spoken receptive vocabulary knowledge. The test was developed in three stages. First, we tested the quality of over 300 items in a pilot test, which we then adapted to a second and a third, final version of the test. Item selection was done on second language (L2) prevalence lists, but other word-related variables (word frequency, age of acquisition, and cognateness) were also considered and their role in the difficulty of the test items was examined. The main predictors of item difficulty were L2 prevalence, age of acquisition, and cognateness, but not word frequency in English corpora.