Bauer and Nation’s criteria by which English inflectional and derivational affixes were arranged into a graded set of seven levels were created to guide teaching and learning, and standardize vocabulary load and size research. 1993) have been used to justify the use of WF6 as a general word counting unit in both L1 and L2 settings for word list creation (Nation 2006a), vocabulary size tests (i.e., Nation and Beglar 2007), vocabulary levels tests (i.e., McLean and Kramer 2015), and lexical research (Nation 2006b 2014). Bauer and Nation’s criteria and first language (L1) studies (Tyler and Nagy 1989 Nagy et al. In L2 lexical and reading research, the most commonly adopted word counting unit is the word family, which consists of the base word and inflected and derived forms from Levels 2–6 of Bauer and Nation’s (1993) affix criteria (hereafter referred to as WF6).
Thus, learners’ ability to comprehend inflectional and derivational forms requires direct investigation. Further, when corpus-based vocabulary findings are used to inform or support language acquisition, there is the additional concern of whether researcher-based conceptualizations of a word, the criteria used to group and count words, matches the psychological realities of a word, the knowledge of words possessed by the target language users. The validity of this research paradigm and corpus-based vocabulary applications is dependent on researchers appropriately operationalizing the word unit (Gardner 2007). Further, it is argued that learners must be able to comprehend a relatively small number of high-frequency, high-coverage words for incidental vocabulary growth otherwise, achieving unassisted comprehension of texts and subsequently contextual word learning would be inhibited (Laufer 1997 Nation 2001). Vocabulary levels research argues that short corpora-derived lists of high-frequency words should be deliberately taught and learned because they cover such a large percentage of the tokens that English language learners encounter. Vocabulary levels research, including investigations into the coverage of text high-frequency words provide, is an example of how corpus-based vocabulary investigations have shaped pedagogy. The influence of corpora and corpus-based research on educational theories, assessment, and pedagogic practices in L2 settings is significant (Nation 2001 Sinclair 2004). This is of importance as the choice of what inflectional and derivational forms are included with a word’s base form has major ramifications for the validity of corpora-derived word lists, word list-based vocabulary tests, and research based upon these (Gardner 2007). INTRODUCTION An important gap in the field of second language (L2) vocabulary research concerns English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ ability to comprehend inflectional and derivational forms. Thus, considering the detrimental impact to reading comprehension from only small decreases in the percentage of known tokens within a text, the results question the inferences made in word family-based research. Results are important because corpus research findings demonstrate that in cases where the word family provides 98 per cent coverage of texts, the flemma only provides 85 per cent coverage of the same texts. The flemma, a word's base form and associated inflectional forms, was found to be an appropriate word counting unit for most participants. A significant difference among the participants' ability to comprehend 12 base forms, associated inflected forms, and associated derived forms was found across the three proficiency groups, and even among participants who demonstrated mastery of the first 4,000 or 5,000 base forms of English.
Japanese EFL learners (N = 279) were divided into three lexical proficiency groups, and their ability to comprehend inflectional and derivational English forms was measured with an English to Japanese translation test. Evidence for the Adoption of the Flemma as an Appropriate Word Counting Unit Evidence for the Adoption of the Flemma as an Appropriate Word Counting UnitĪbstract An important gap in the field of second language vocabulary research concerns the ability of Asian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to comprehend inflectional and derivational word family members.