ELELex: a CEFR-graded lexical resource for Spanish as a foreign language

Since Thorndike's list of the 20,000 most frequent words in English, vocabulary lists have been used consistently to help define learning goals for the lexical component of foreign language curriculums. Various approaches have been used to build such lists. The most common approach consists in estimating word frequencies in large native language (L1) corpora. For Spanish, recent lists include the LEXESP (Sebastian et al., 2000) and the SUBTLEX-ESP (Cuetos et al., 2011). Davies and Face (2006) also derived a frequency list from textbooks for Spanish. A second approach relies on expert knowledge, as is the case for the Reference Level Descriptions (RLD) of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference). For Spanish, the RLD is called Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes and describes level A1 to level C2. Third, recent work tried to automatically obtain a graded list of words with machine learning algorithms (Brooke et al., 2012). ELELex is part of the CEFRLex project that aims to describe word usage by L2 learners of several European languages. The project adopts a fine-grained and continuous approach of word usage and considers that words do not occur with the same frequency at the different stages of the learning process. Therefore, ELELex is a lexical resource for Spanish that describes the frequency distributions of thousands of lexemes over the six levels of the CEFR scale. These distributions have been estimated on corpora of pedagogical materials intended for Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) purposes such as textbooks and simplified readers. The resulting list has been checked manually and is machine-readable and open-licensed. Furthermore, it will be available via an on-line query engine for teachers and/or learners. We believe that ELELex paves the way for a large spectrum of research opportunities for text readability assessment (Tack et al., 2016a; Pilán et al., 2016), for automated essay grading systems (Pilán et al., 2016), or for personalized models of learners' lexical knowledge (Tack et al., 2016b). In our poster, we will present the methodology used to create ELELex, report figures about ELELex in comparison with other frequency lists for Spanish and show the possible didactic implementations of such a tool