Exploring the Productive Vocabulary of EFL Learners through a Lexical Availability Task

Resumo

This study has two objectives. The first is to ascertain whether there exists a relationship betweenthe level of productive vocabulary and lexical availability in English as a foreign language. The secondis to explore the depth of productive lexical knowledge through qualitative analysis of the level ofwords generated by upper secondary EFL learners. The measurement instruments were a ProductiveVocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) and a lexical availability task, with eight semantic categories thatserved as prompts to activate word production. In the present study we analysed two traditional(SCHOOL, ANIMALS) and two non-traditional (TRAIN, FREE) semantic categories. We aimed todetermine whether lexical availability and productive vocabulary are two closely related dimensions.The results show a significant positive correlation between the production of words generated in thelexical availability task and the scores obtained in PVLT. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis of thedata indicates that the words generated by two groups of EFL learners correspond predominantly tothe level of the 1,000 and 2,000 most frequent words in