Volume 22, No. 1 Special Issue: In Honor of Paul Nation

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/68063

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 16
  • Item
    From the Guest Editor
    (University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2010-04) Coxhead, Averil
  • Item
    From the Editors
    (University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2010-04) RFL Staff
  • Item
    Second Language Reading Research and Instruction: Crossing the Boundaries by ZhaoHong Han and Neil J. Anderson (Eds.)
    (University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2010-04) Miller, Ryan T.
  • Item
    Words as species: An alternative approach to estimating productive vocabulary size
    (University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2010-04) Meara, Paul ; Alcoy, Juan Carlos Olmos
    This paper addresses the issue of how we might be able to assess productive vocabulary size in second language learners. It discusses some previous attempts to develop measures of this sort, and argues that a fresh approach is needed in order to overcome some persistent problems that dog research in this area. The paper argues that there might be some similarities between assessing productive vocabularies—where many of the words known by learners do not actually appear in the material we can extract them from—and counting animals in the natural environment. If this is so, then there might be a case for adapting the capture-recapture methods developed by ecologists to measure animal populations. The paper reports a preliminary attempt to develop this analogy.
  • Item
    Using glossaries to increase the lexical coverage of television programs
    (University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2010-04) Webb, Stuart
    This study examined the extent to which glossaries may affect the percentage of known words (coverage) in television programs. The transcripts of 51 episodes of 2 television programs (House and Grey’s Anatomy) were analyzed using Range (Heatley, Nation, & Coxhead, 2002) to create glossaries consisting of the low-frequency (less frequent than the 3,000 word level) word families that were encountered 10 or more times in each program. The results showed that coverage of the glossaries was 1.31% for Grey’s Anatomy and 2.26% for House. This was greater than coverage of the 3,001–4,000 most frequent word families in both programs. The cumulative coverage including the glossaries at the 3,000 word level increased to 96.00% for House and 97.20% for Grey’s Anatomy. The findings indicate that glossaries have the potential to improve comprehension of television programs.