Lexical profiles of children and adolescent EFL learners in the semantic domain of animals

Resumen

This chapter looks at the English lexical output and word association of children and adolescent EFL learners in the semantic domain of animals. Research on the relation of age and the productive vocabulary of these groups is scarce and has focused on the comparison of scores obtained on tests or in the words used in compositions, showing a greater production in older learners than in young learners. However, the lexical output generated by EFL learners in response to cue-words in semantic categorization tasks has hardly been investigated, let alone the examination of qualitative aspects of their lexical output such as the strategies and associations that children and adolescent EFL learners use in word retrieval (clusters) and word search (switches). The present study contributes to fill this gap by considering the age-group as a factor of possible learning differences as observed in the words retrieved in a semantic fluency task by children and adolescents EFL learners. The quantitative results show differences concerning word production, clusters, and switches. Likewise, although similarities are observed concerning the most frequent words and association patterns, the qualitative analysis reveal inter and intragroup differences that need to be considered when researching individual language learning differences in English as a target. The findings also have implications for education as they provide teachers with actual words, and the associations produced by children and adolescent EFL learners when asked to generate words related to the semantic domain of animals.