Exploring Turkish EFL students' lexical availability alongside their receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge

BERAT EMRE ŞAHİN

Exploring Turkish EFL students' lexical availability alongside their receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge

Thesis Type: Postgraduate

Institution Of The Thesis: Yildiz Technical University, Graduate School of Social Sciences, Foreign Languages Educataion, Turkey

Approval Date: 2022

Thesis Language: English

Student: BERAT EMRE ŞAHİN

Supervisor: Suzan Kavanoz

Open Archive Collection: AVESIS Open Access Collection

Abstract:

This study aims to contribute to EFL vocabulary research and vocabulary use by examining Turkish university students' lexical availability levels by applying a lexical availability elicitation tool consisting of certain semantic prompts divided into non emotion (Animals, Body Parts, Food and Drink, School) and emotion (Love, Hate, Happy, Sad) categories. It also intends to explore B1 level students' receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge by calculating estimated sizes between 1000-5000 words based on the corpus. In the lexical availability part, most words for non-emotion prompts were generated for the prompt Food and Drink, followed by School, Animals, and Body Parts. For the emotion prompts, most words were elicited via the prompt Happy, followed by Love, Sad, and Hate. For the receptive vocabulary data, the New Vocabulary Levels Test was used to seek participants' 0-5000 frequency range. Students' average receptive vocabulary size was 2818 within 5000 most frequent words, which is within the boundaries of the average receptive vocabulary range of the B1 level of the Common European Framework (CEFR). Productive vocabulary knowledge was assessed with a writing task, which revealed that, on average, 88,69% of the word types used in the essays belonged to the 1000 most frequent word range, followed by 6,96% on 2000-word, 2,69% on 3000-word, 0,50% on 4000-word, and finally 0,35% on the 5000-word band. The findings of this study, looking into three different aspects of L2 vocabulary fundamentals, are thought to provide insights into L2 vocabulary learning, language proficiency, and mental lexicon.