Relationships between lexical compensatory strategy use and productive vocabulary knowledge in the acquisition process of english as a second language

Abstract

The present quantitative study focuses on exploring the relationships between the use of oral compensatory lexical strategies, and the productive size of vocabulary knowledge of pre-intermediate and intermediate Chilean English language learners. The specific objectives were, on the one hand, to measure the participants’ size of productive English vocabulary knowledge and to identify the use of lexical compensatory strategies. On the other hand, to compare productive vocabulary knowledge and lexical compensatory strategies in the two groups of students. The data were collected by means of two instruments: two Productive Vocabulary Level Tests (Laufer & Nation,1999) (3,000 and 5,000 words). The data for the lexical compensatory strategies were obtained by means of an oral production task, which was designed by the research group, based on Poulisse's proposals (1990). The participants of the study were 12 second-semester and 14 fourth-semester undergraduate students of the four-year BA program of English Linguistics and Literature at Universidad de Chile. The results of the data analysis were statistically processed by means of statistical methods. Correlation coefficients (Pearson & Spearman) were calculated to identify relationships between the variables.