MARÍA PILAR AGUSTÍN LLACH

Universidad de La Rioja

Lexical errors in young efl learners: how do they relate to proficiency measures?

Semántica y Lexicología

The present paper examines the relationship between the frequency of lexical errors and the proficiency level of the learners. The role of vocabulary as an indicator of proficiency level is a generally acknowledged fact. In the sense that lexical errors are a manifestation of lack of lexical knowledge, it seems reasonable to think that they will relate negatively to level of proficiency. Second language competence was measured by a cloze test and a reading comprehension test. Results revealed that with a correlation coefficient of r = 0.1265, scores in the cloze test did not relate to the frequency of lexical errors. On the contrary, reading comprehension scores did correlate to lexical errors, r = 0.2863 (significant at p<0.5). These results led us to the conclusion that the cloze and the reading may measure different competencies, with the former measuring discrete- point language knowledge, and the former more general linguistic competence. According to this, lexical errors were found to be a measure of language proficiency and can thus be used as objective criteria to determine linguistic competence and quality of language production.



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