Use of word lists in a high-stakes, low-exposure context:Topic-driven or frequency-informed

The awarding organisations that create and administer high-stakes assessments for beginner-to-low intermediate 16-year-old learners of French, German, and Spanish in England provide optional topic-driven word lists as guides for teachers and textbook writers. Given that these lists are developed by the awarding organisations, they exert a powerful washback effect on teaching and learning. However, we do not know how much of these lists have actually been used in exams. We therefore analysed the extent to which these lists have been used when developing the General Certificate of Secondary Education listening and reading exams, a corpus totalling 116,645 words. One key finding showed that approximately half of the awarding organisations’ lists had never been used in any of the exams to date. Given recent changes to curriculum policy, we also investigated how word list type—frequency-informed versus the awarding organisations’ topic-driven lists—affected lexical coverage of the exams. Overall, our findings suggested that using the topic-driven lists was likely to be a suboptimal use of lesson time, as they did not provide learners with enough words to understand any given text with ease. Frequency-informed word lists, however, seemed to better prepare learners for the exams.