Productive vocabulary knowledge of spanish efl learners

This paper aims at investigating (i) the productive vocabulary knowledge of 38 10th grade (4th ESO) EFL Spanish students in two secondary schools located in the north of Spain, (ii) analysing the results obtained according to sex-based differences among the participants and (iii) its pedagogical implications for students’ understanding of written and spoken discourse in English. We used the parallel version (version A+ version C) of the Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (PVLT) (Laufer and Nation 1995, 1999) as the instrument to measure students’ productive vocabulary knowledge. Our results reveal that our students’ productive vocabulary size is below 1,000 words. As for sex-based differences, girls’ mean scores are higher than boys’ but the differences between both sexes are not statistically significant. These findings also indicate that most of the students in the present study could have problems to understand written and spoken discourse in English due to their low scores in the PVLT