A new approach to measuring lexical sophistication in L2 oral production

The aims of this chapter are a) to give a comprehensive description of a new tool for lexical profiling by reporting how it was developed, and b) to indicate possible areas of use and future developments of the tool. The tool has been used for measuring the lexical sophistication of Swedish learners of French and Italian. The different steps of development have partly been presented in previous studies (Bardel & Lindqvist, 2011; Bardel, Gudmundson & Lindqvist, 2012; Lindqvist, Bardel & Gudmundson, 2011) but are complemented here through a detailed account of the tool, in order to enable replication and use of the method with other languages. The outline of this chapter is as follows: first, as a background, we provide a survey of methods designed to measure lexical richness in L2 production. Then we discuss the inherent differences between written and spoken language and what these differences may imply when lexical richness is measured. Next, we present a new method for analyzing L2 learners’ lexical profiles in oral production data, giving a detailed technical description of the creation of the tool. We then discuss pros and cons with frequency-based measures in general and present our solutions to some of the problems brought up. Finally, we suggest some potential areas of use and discuss some possible improvements of the method