Creating and evaluating corpus-informed word lists for adolescent, beginner-to-low-intermediate learners of French, German, and Spanish

This study explores implications of policy changes relating to the composition and use of word lists for French, German, and Spanish as foreign languages in secondary schools in England. Against the backdrop of literature relating to word list creation and use, we review requirements for the vocabulary content of high-stakes examinations in these languages under current and new policy and describe the methodological steps we took in collaboration with teachers and members of an awarding organisation to create corpus-informed lists for adolescent, beginner-to-low-intermediate learners based on frequency, connectedness between words and topics, and teacher judgments of usefulness. Taking the current, non-obligatory and topic-driven lists as a point of comparison, we analyse the content of lists compiled following each approach and examine the lexical coverage they provide of four test corpora designed to represent potential learning goals of adolescents: passing exams, further study, reading and discussing young adult literature, and engaging with web content. Despite being 36%–44% (foundation tier) and 11%–21% (higher tier) shorter, the new lists cover an average 11% (foundation tier) and 18% (higher tier) more of every corpus. Our further analyses suggest that these stark results can be attributed to (i) the nature of the content (rather than function) words, (ii) negligible coverage benefits from multiword phrases on the current lists, and (iii) more even part-of-speech distribution in the new lists. Some of our methods were used by awarding organisations in England to develop accredited lists for the new examinations. Those lists share large numbers of lexical items with the lists reported here, suggesting our findings have immediate implications for secondary school foreign language education in England. More generally, we demonstrate a replicable approach to developing short lists with high coverage, suggest some pedagogical applications, and discuss how our methods could be adapted for other contexts.