Analysing undergraduate students' L2 productive lexical profile through Wordsmith Tools

WordSmith Tools (Scott 1997) is a technological instrument which provides insight on how words behave in texts. It is a legitimate tool for teaching, learning and research, which has either been used as an assessing instrument or as a corpus analyser. Nevertheless, as far as we know, there has not been employed, so as to provide a new insight into the productive lexical profile of a sample of Spanish undergraduate learners of English as an L2. In this talk, we will present the preliminary results of a study that is being carried out with an homogeneous group of learners of English as L2 at University of La Rioja, within the academic year 2001-2002. The purpose of this study is to portray undergraduate students’ productive vocabulary in English as an L2 , by making use of this electronic tool. Our presentation will be structured as follows: first, we will review the state of the art of studies that have employed WordSmith Tools; secondly, we will describe our sample of informants and our instrument of assessment; and finally, we will focus on a discussion of the following aspects: (a) assessment of our sample of subjects’ embedded productive vocabulary in English as an L2 through this technological instrument; and (b) description of test takers’ productive lexical profile. REFERENCES SCOTT, M. (1997): WordSmith Tools. Oxford: Oxford University Press