Vocabulary Measures

Because I plan to have some type of linguistic measurement as part of my validation study, I have been reading about types of language statistics. The most recent is a study by Batia Laufer and Paul Nation.

Laufer, B., & Nation, P. (1995). Vocabulary size and use: Lexical richness in L2 written production. Applied Linguistics, 16, 307-322.

I am not familiar with Laufer, but I most certainly have heard about Nation. He is the man behind the Academic Word List (AWL), and list of commonly used words in university writing. We use the AWL at our center to help our students improve their reading and writing of academic texts.

This study appears to be pre-AWL since Laufer and Nation make no reference to it, and instead refer to the general service list and other university word lists. I imagine that the AWL was created not long after this study, since the inklings of the AWL are emanating from this work.

The primary focus of the study is an argument in favor of a new kind of vocabulary measure: the Lexical Frequency Profile. Although I don't exactly buy the LFP bid (the explanation of its use was verbose and confusing), I did appreciate the succinct discussion of existing measures of vocabulary use. In a matter of about 2 pages, Laufer and Nation clearly explain the pros and cons to several commonly used lexical measures. Even if I didn't get much out of the rest of the paper, I enjoyed their assessment of these measures.

The question is raises for me is: what linguistic measures will I use in my study? Almost certainly I would like to have at least one lexical measure, and hopefully this study will help me to explain and justify my decision.